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Following previous work in L1 acquisition, SLA has witnessed a veritable explosion of research activity in the domain of temporality since the mid 1980s. In the hefty book under review here, Kathleen Bardovi-Harlig, for several years one of the most active protagonists in the field, sets out to organize the dislocated array of findings, methods, and approaches to date.

This volume, part of a series on research methodologies in second language acquisition (SLA), describes contributions that conversation analysis (CA) makes to the field. Markee argues that CA, which provides microanalyses of moment-by-moment “talk-in-interaction” (Schegloff, 1987), makes visible learners' efforts to speak and understand a new language. He questions the tendency in SLA toward theory-driven and largely experimental research at the expense of theory-building and naturalistic methods.

This book addresses issues of major concern among researchers and practitioners of second language (L2) reading, including theory of reading, testing of reading comprehension, L2 reading instruction, and methodological issues in L2 reading research. The book not only critically examines reading theories, previous studies, and conventional practice in teaching and testing, but also provides valuable insights into new forms of testing and teaching materials for L2 readers.

AN INTEGRATED VIEW OF LANGUAGE DEVELOPMENT: PAPERS IN HONOR OF HENNING WODE. Petra Burmeister, Thorsten Piske, and Andreas Rohde (Eds.). Trier, Germany: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag, 2002. Pp. xxv + 552. 40.00 € paper.Wode's lifetime of scholarship can be divided loosely into three general research areas, each of which comprises one section of this edited volume: theory-building in first (L1) and second (L2) language acquisition, the development of speech production and perception skills in L1 and L2, and immersion education and foreign language teaching. This first area of work, dating from the 1970s and early 1980s, draws in part from Wode's detailed analysis of the language of his four young children. The second, initiated in 1989 with Pieper, stems from a large-scale study of early phonological development. Finally, the third, begun in the wake of European integration, came out of his work to support immersion programs and language learning in preschools and elementary and secondary institutions.

This published version of Markham's dissertation surveys the literature on second language phonetics (but not phonology), proposes two models, and presents experiments involving imitation of languages and dialects.

This multifaceted mosaic of vocabulary acquisition should be in every language professional's library, nudging us to look beyond size of vocabulary and toward a better understanding of what Meara (1996) has called its cognitive “organisation.”

This monograph is part of a series on second language research methodology edited by Gass and Schachter. Their introduction to the text highlights the interdisciplinary nature of SLA research and the necessity for a fuller understanding of the wide variety of research methodologies in current use. Each monograph is devoted to a particular data collection method or instrument and provides an overview of (a) the theoretical and research background, (b) the current uses of the instrument or method, (c) appropriate research questions, (d) underlying assumptions, and (e) any problems associated with practical use. Forthcoming texts will cover case studies, conversation analysis, elicited imitation, data-driven modeling, and speech acts.

This collection includes 19 of the 27 papers presented at the Generative Approaches to Second Language Acquisition Conference held at McGill University in 1997. Also included are the plenary presentations by Margaret Thomas and Claire Lefebvre. After a short preface, the papers are presented in alphabetical order, each preceded by an abstract. French translations of the abstracts are given at the end of the volume.

In their introduction, Piller and Pavlenko claim that SLA research suffers from: an almost ubiquitous gender-blindness due to the prevalence of psycholinguistic and Universal Grammar approaches … which assume a generic language user and disregard individual variation as “noise,” a distraction which cannot be avoided but which cannot in any way contribute to our understanding of the universal facts of SLA. (p. 3)

Phonetics belongs to the Oxford series entitled Introduction to language studies edited by H. G. Widdowson. Widdowson states in the preface that the purpose of this series is “not to supplant but to support the more academically oriented introductions to linguistics: to prepare the conceptual background” by providing “a general context in reference to which detail makes sense” (p. vii). The book is divided into four sections: a survey, which is written to be readable and informative; a collection of readings extracted from the specialist literature, which extends the concepts presented in the survey; a list of references; and a glossary, which is cross-referenced to the survey.

This book presents a psycholinguistic investigation of how the English past tense is interpreted by adult English native speakers (NSs) during on-line sentence comprehension. Structurally speaking, tense is a morphosyntactic category of the verb and bears semantic content: In other words, it locates the event described by the sentence with respect to the speech time and also other events in discourse. In chapter 1, Dickey presents extensive background on the semantic literature on tense and sentence processing and introduces several research questions: how and when the language processor assigns an interpretation to tense markers, whether the domain of interpretation is the sentence or the discourse, whether interpretation is assigned immediately or is delayed, and whether discourse or syntactic simplicity guides the analysis of temporal interpretation. To answer these questions, Dickey focuses on three phenomena—interpretation of aspect with temporal adverbials and adverb preposing ( John had left at 5 vs. At 5, John had left ), interpretation of tense in matrix contexts and temporal anaphora ( Sheila had a party last Friday; Sam got drunk ), and interpretation of sequence of tense phenomena ( John said that Mary was sick )—which he develops and tests empirically in chapters 2, 3, and 4, respectively. In chapter 5, the conclusion, remaining questions are addressed. The book presents a total of seven experiments using a self-paced reading task, which measures reaction times at critical segments of a given sentence, to see how semantic ambiguity is resolved by the language processor.

Birch's volume on how first language (L1) features such as its orthographic system, phonology, or morphology exert a significant influence on an ESL/EFL reader's performance is an invaluable contribution to the complex and complicated issue of assisting learners of other languages (particularly those from languages with different writing systems) in the process of becoming more efficient and effective readers. This book is relevant to “all ESL and EFL practitioners … teaching illiterate people to read in English or to those whose students already know how to read in their native language” and to “reading researchers, curriculum designers and material writers” including “teachers-in-training” (p. x).

This volume consists of a collection of 13 papers from the 23rd International L.A.U.D. conference on “The Cultural Context in Communication Across Languages” held at the University of Duisburg, Germany, in March, 1997. The conference was concerned with two different aspects of cross-cultural communication: business communication and the cultural dimension of foreign language teaching. The papers dealing with this second aspect are collected in the present volume.

Sociocultural Theory and Second Language Learning, edited by James Lantolf, contains nine research reports and two theoretical papers that introduce the sociocultural tradition to the wider field of second language acquisition (SLA) and provide specific examples of questions and methodologies that emerge from the sociocultural framework. Sociocultural theory expands the types of inquiry addressed by the field of SLA research by suggesting a participation metaphor of language learning as an alternative to, or an expansion of, the more widespread input-output or computational metaphor. Although the book is designed primarily for researchers, most chapters also explore ways that sociocultural theory and research can inform language pedagogy.

This volume extends the traditional focus of this series on the phonology-phonetics interface with papers exploring the contribution of various types of empirical data—including acoustic, articulatory, and perceptual—to the principal themes embodied in the questions of what constitutes a possible word and what underlies the human capability to produce language.

This book, as part of a series published by Erlbaum entitled Second language acquisition research: Theoretical and methodological issues, addresses the question as to how the acquisition of a nonnative language progresses through interaction in language classrooms. As the author admits (p. xiii), this is hardly a new topic in studies of SLA. The book, however, sheds some new light by introducing novel theoretical and methodological perspectives in dealing with this old topic. The author finds in Vygotskyan ideas a theoretical stance to frame her views of language, the language learner, and the language learning process. Furthermore, it focuses on the second language (L2) acquisition of Japanese by English-speaking learners, which has only recently begun attracting the attention of SLA researchers.

In this volume Brumfit provides a detailed, yet highly readable, analysis of many problems that at least partially arise from viewing language as a static code. He describes language as a dynamic force that interacts with other social forces and practices and as a process that is permeable, variable, and useful. He argues that the best way to teach, research, and plan language policy is to recognize and enhance the users' abilities to use language for their own permeable, variable, and unpredictable purposes.

This book is intended as an introduction both to the principles and parameters framework (Chomsky, 1981) and to the second language (L2) acquisition of syntactic representations. Hawkins's basic aim is to present evidence for the view that L2 learners progressively build subconscious mental grammars (i.e., a syntactic system) guided by Universal Grammar—an innate, language-specific system. However, this volume is not just an introductory textbook presenting and summarizing the work of other researchers in this particular field. Indeed, the book has another major aim: Within the context of the most current debates on the L2 acquisition of syntactic knowledge, Hawkins introduces his own theory of L2 development, which he terms Modulated Structure Building.

The authors begin this introductory text by posing four major questions for the study of language: what is the nature of language, how do we acquire it, how do we use it in speech production and comprehension, and how is it represented in the brain? These questions also define the orientation of the book, which aims to introduce the reader to the study of linguistics through four interrelated subfields: linguistics proper, developmental linguistics, psycholinguistics, and neurolinguistics. Conspicuously absent from the list, of course, is a fifth fundamental question about language: what is the relationship between language use and social structure? Sociolinguistics is only briefly defined and introduced, and discussion of sociolinguistics throughout the text is limited to the relationship between social structure and language variation and change.

It has been more than a decade since the publication of Paul Nation's Teaching and learning vocabulary (1990), which brought together the findings in lexical acquisition and teaching at the time and has been an invaluable reference and guide to many in the field. However, after years of neglect, vocabulary acquisition has finally come into its own with an explosion of attention and new research, creating a need for an update. Just in time comes Norbert Schmitt's Vocabulary in language teaching (VLT) in the Cambridge Language Education Series.

Partington has produced an attractive and useful introduction to the field of applied corpus linguistics, a field that has been around for 40 years (since the Brown corpus) but is only now coming into its own in the United States. The volume is attractive for three main reasons: it is clearly and pleasantly written, it quotes extensively and appropriately from the earlier general and applied linguistics literature, and it contains an impressive range of examples consisting of concordance lines followed by commentary and analysis.

The past decade has seen an increasing interest within the second language (L2) field in drawing on psycholinguistic, neurolinguistic-neurobiological, and cognitive psychological theories when explaining various aspects of L2 acquisition and use (e.g., Schmidt, 1995; Schuman, 1997; Skehan, 1998). Although Sydney Lamb's account of the neurocognitive basis of language does not focus specifically on second languages, its general analysis of how the brain's linguistic system operates and develops provides highly relevant background knowledge to these recent L2 research directions.

The relationship between brain structure and language has been of interest since the nineteenth century, as is evidenced by phrenology studies. In modern times, neurolinguistics has tried to investigate this relationship more objectively and scientifically. In their book Language and the brain, Obler and Gjerlow define neurolinguistics as “the study of how the brain (neuro) permits us to have language (linguistics)” (p. 1). As the definition indicates, the book addresses neurolinguistics in a simple, nontechnical manner. Except for chapter 2, “The Brain,” the book presents a readable yet comprehensive account of the important issues in neurolinguistics.

This volume presents comprehensive research on English refusals, focusing primarily on L2 use and secondarily on second language acquisition. Twenty-four dyads were video-taped performing open role plays in response to eight situations (two suggestions, two offers, two invitations, and two requests) designed to elicit a refusal. Each dyad consisted of an English NS and NNS, the latter being native speakers of Japanese with low to intermediate English proficiency.

Braidi's new textbook is intended to provide an overview of multiple perspectives on the acquisition of second language syntax to “applied linguistics students” and “prospective L2 teachers” (preface, p. vii). After an introduction that lays a good deal of historical and conceptual groundwork, we find a chapter on “first-language and second-language interrelations” and then the core of the volume comprising a chapter each on Universal Grammar (UG) perspectives, perspectives based in typological universals, processing approaches, and functional approaches. She ends with a conclusion that summarizes major findings and discusses implications for her readership. The text includes fairly extensive references as well as name, language, and subject indexes.

This easy-to-read paperback is the result of the author's desire to learn more about how students think and feel about themselves as learners in a “large urban college” pre-freshman ESL composition class. It is intended for teachers, scholars, and graduate students who are interested in how students learn to write as well as their accompanying thought processes and emotions. The main body of the book, chapters 4–7, presents “case studies of the journal writing experiences of five students” (p. 8) chosen to represent the variety of cultural backgrounds and personal involvement with the freewriting process in journal keeping. The students came from Colombia, Ethiopia, the Dominican Republic, People's Republic of China, and Japan.

In his introduction, Campbell makes a case for the broader relevance of historical linguistics by noting that observing what does and does not change in language contributes to “the understanding of universal grammar, language typology, and human cognition in general” (p. 2). The generativist perspective that phonological and syntactic changes are linked to language acquisition, cited on page 236, illustrates one interface between historical linguistics and general linguistic theory.

This book is intended for teachers of children whose first language is not English and who are in mainstream classes in an English-speaking country. It has a strong orientation toward Great Britain.

The series to which this volume belongs was designed to provide, “. . . a large scale view . . . of language study” (p. ix), with the goal of the present volume being to introduce the reader to the “comprehensive discipline” of psycholinguistics. The volume begins with a survey of the topic in four chapters: introduction, language acquisition, language competence (comprehension and production), and language dissolution. Section 2 contains abstracts of selected readings followed by study questions, and section 3 lists annotated references. Both of these sections are organized by topic area in order to guide further study. The fourth section is a succinct glossary. The author has accomplished the goal for this volume, producing a text that is comprehensive, scholarly, and easily readable.

This updated version of Cruttenden's popular first edition (1986, reprinted in 1989, 1991, 1994, & 1995) focuses on British English but also discusses other varieties of English, comparative intonation, universals, and L1 acquisition. Much of the work is unchanged from the original, yet this edition includes a significant update to the literature.

Input, interaction, and the second language learner is, as the title suggests, a view of the relationship among input, interaction, and second language development. Susan M. Gass has written an extremely readable book that explicates many of the most discussed issues in second language learning in the 1990s. Her intention, successfully achieved, is to demonstrate where theories and frameworks coincide, not just collide.

This volume contains 10 original chapters reflecting research and discussion on the issue of focus on form (FonF) in second language instruction. As the editors point out in the preface, it is timely now to discuss and clarify terminology and research issues in FonF studies, mainly because of the diversity of reactions to this construct. The central aim of the chapters is to explore the nature and feasibility of FonF and their intended audience is second language acquisition (SLA) researchers and language teaching practitioners, as well as graduate students in the field of applied linguistics.

Is there an interface between explicit and implicit knowledge in L2 acquisition? Rick de Graaff's doctoral dissertation tests this question in an experimental study from a weak interface position. This position indicates that explicit knowledge has a facilitative role in the acquisition of implicit knowledge when it engages the attention of learners and makes them notice input features (Schmidt, 1990). De Graaff studies the effect of explicit computer-aided self-instruction on the acquisition of morphosyntax in Experanto (an artificial language, based on Zamenhoff's Esperanto) and Spanish (as a foreign language) by adult native speakers of Dutch. Acquisition is tested in interaction with five intervening factors that constitute a controlled linguistic, psychological, and pedagogic context (i.e., complexity of structures, rule-based learning in syntax and exemplar-based learning in morphology, familiarity with the structures, availability of explicit knowledge, and learners' aptitude). Experanto is chosen to control for the influence of previous knowledge and contact outside class, and Spanish is chosen to make the results more generalizable.

This collection of papers is offered to “serve as a foundation point to illuminate the range of considerations and approaches” in language test construct validation research (p. 12), and it succeeds admirably. The studies represent a useful sample of validation research questions and methods. Research methods are carefully described and motivated, and many chapters have appendices containing original research materials. Discussion and interpretation of the results seem abridged in a few studies, but collectively the chapters present a clear and useful picture of the complexity of construct validation research.