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This collection of 28 papers was first presented at the 1994 GURT. The theme of the conference was educational linguistics, crosscultural communication, and global interdependence. The vastness of the theme is reflected in the diversity of the chapter topics. Twelve of 28 deal with curricular issues. Of these, those by Kachru, Nyikos, D. Freeman, van Lier, Loew, and Richards discuss issues and concerns broadly related to the preparation of language teachers. D. Freeman's chapter is worthy of note because it offers an interesting discussion on the various strands of scholarship, which he suggests comprise the knowledge base of language teaching. Six of the 12 chapters center on curricular issues for the language classroom. Matters relating to the teaching of culture are dealt with by Oxford and Bamgbose. Brown discusses “responsive language teaching.” Citkina reports on innovative foreign language methods recently introduced in the Ukraine. A good discussion on computer-mediated communication and its usefulness to the language classroom is offered by Stauffer. Pica provides an excellent overview of the research on task-related learning and an equally useful discussion of its pedagogical implications.

Communication Strategies: Psycholinguistic and Sociolinguistic Perspectives is not simply an update of the 1983 Strategies in Interlanguage Communication (Færch & Kasper). This volume goes beyond the earlier concerns of definition, identification, and classification of communication strategies to considerations of different theoretical and analytical perspectives, research methodologies, and the role of cultural and linguistic backgrounds.

This book is an introductory text intended for nonspecialists in sociolinguistics or linguistics. It is organized into four sections and designed so that its first section, the “Survey of Sociolinguistics,” may be read alone or along with the accompanying selected readings in the second part. The third and fourth sections are references and a glossary. The readings section also contains study questions that refer to both the survey and the readings, leading the reader to integrate the information in both sections. The topics covered in the survey include the social study of language, the ethnography of speaking and structure of conversation, locating variations in speech, styles, gender, and social class, bilinguals and bilingualism, societal multilingualism, and applied sociolinguistics (which covers language policy and planning).

Grauberg has undertaken the ambitious task of presenting in a relatively short book the linguistic and pedagogical aspects of teaching French and German as foreign languages. Despite many serious omissions, including a framework for discussing language proficiency, his classroom observations may prove useful for future French and German teachers.

Ridley addresses two developments in language teaching and SLA research. The first development is toward learner autonomy through self-reflection. None of her subjects reported learning a language in a classroom with a focus on learning strategies, though Ridley documents their individual preferred learning strategies with data from the beginning of the study. She then formulates her first hypothesis, “that individual learners have their own preferred lexical problem-solving strategies and patterns of reflective monitoring which are manifest when they speak and also write in the target language” (p. 20).

This book is a first attempt to bring together a collection of state-of-the-art studies of various lines of research on language processing in Spanish, ranging from speech perception to sentence production.

In her engrossing account of the historical relationship between theory and practice in second language teaching, Diane Musumeci observes that in the often contentious discussions about this relationship “the one point on which almost everyone agrees is that scant evidence exists to support any single, unified theory of language learning” (p. 3). In Breaking Tradition: An Exploration of the Historical Relationship Between Theory and Practice in Second Language Teaching, Musumeci convincingly argues that the claim that there has been no consistent theory of second language teaching is not only ahistorical but has also discouraged critical investigation of the ideas of tradition and innovation in the field.

Whether they are collecting data from spoken or written sources, learners or teachers, English corpora or academic essays, or talk about disease and illness, applied linguists are confronted with the pervasive use of metaphor. Metaphor, as a mode of talk and thought, is a way of making meaning that is particularly linked to the sociocultural context. What counts as a metaphor? How can we operationalize, analyze, and categorize it? What research methodology is best suited for the study of metaphor? Cameron and Low's timely collection of papers is a first attempt to put metaphor research on the map of applied linguistics.

This first volume in an Oxford series of introductions to language study aims to provide both the student of linguistics and the general reader with a broader overview of linguistic science. Widdowson attempts to present a coherent outline of the central issues in linguistics that is accessible to the novice yet not simplistic. Following the series format, the volume is divided into four sections: Survey, Readings, References, and Glossary.

This book is a longitudinal study of negotiation of meaning in interactions among foreign language learners (FLLs) of Spanish at a Dutch university, and interactions between those students and native speakers (NSs) of Spanish.

The purpose of this book is to provide language teachers with insights and tools for understanding some of the reasons why their adult students often encounter less-than-smooth sailing when trying to learn another language. The book explores a variety of case studies that involve real students, thus bringing to life the human dimension of the learning difficulties presented. Although some examples of ESL students are provided, the major focus is on foreign language learners. Ehrman's felicitous writing style ensures that the book reads like an extended and intellectually stimulating conversation with the author.

Imagine my surprise when I received an SLA textbook by Rod Ellis to review, and it turned out to be a paperback weighing only 7 ½ ounces! Something must be different, and indeed it is: This new volume is intended for the novice student (or for others without academic engagement in linguistics). For such an audience, the volume opens up a fresh niche for SLA classes, one that is not all that common, at least at North American universities.

This volume charts the development of contrastive rhetoric (CR) over the past 30 years. Although CR has not attempted to identify developmental stages of L2 writers, it is essentially the study of transfer: the influence of L1 writing conventions and cultural and cognitive dimensions on L2 writing. Major strengths of this book are its critical review of the literature, concise definitions, and documentation of the progression of CR from narrow L2 text-based analyses to the inclusion of multiple approaches.

This volume sets forth an excellent overview of cutting-edge research in reading and language processing and illuminates many of the controversial issues related to human cognition. Readers will find, as an example, apt commentaries on the tension between connectionist modeling and the antecedent symbolic processing, and the subsequent efforts of researchers to resolve paradigmatic conflicts. As a result, several hybrid models, incorporating elements of a symbolic system and an activation-based connectionist mechanism, have emerged. Similarly, the logic and value of relevant research procedures are debated. Methodological scrutiny, in fact, is a prominent theme throughout the volume. Among other things, a variety of online measures, such as technologically enhanced procedures for eye-movement tracking, pupillometry monitoring, and moving-window display techniques, are discussed.

Although the lexicon has traditionally been regarded as one of the three essential elements of language learning, the other two being phonology and syntax, it has often been almost ignored, or perhaps more accurately, taken for granted, whereas phonology and especially syntax have received most of the attention of theorists and teachers alike. However, there is now a growing awareness that lexical knowledge is both more complex than it appears and also more fundamental to learners' overall knowledge of a given language than previously thought. The volume under review is a good introduction to the complexities of lexical learning and a valuable guide for those who are interested in doing empirical research in this area.

Much of the existing literature on the bilingual language acquisition of preschool children consists of single-child case studies conducted by parents who are trained linguists. Such parents had usually made special efforts to cultivate bilingualism in their children.

Computational Psycholinguistics is an integrated collection by researchers within psycholinguistics aimed at providing a balanced treatment of current computational modeling in both language perception and generation. The initial chapters of the book provide an introduction to the general techniques used in computational modeling (Dijkstra & de Smedt), as well as perspectives from traditional symbolic artificial intelligence (Daelemans & de Smedt) and connectionist approaches (Murre & Goebel). The themes presented in the introductory chapters are well integrated into the rest of the book, consistent with the goal of providing a relatively self-contained introduction, suitable for a graduate-level psycholinguistics classroom or a general introductory source.

Applied linguistics embodies a kaleidoscope of disciplines, theoretical approaches, research paradigms, and beliefs about practice. Its diversity is reflected in this festschrift honoring Henry Widdowson. The volume contains the contributions of 27 authors from five continents and, like the honoree's own body of work, represents a wide range of topics. In their introductory chapter, the editors outline the disciplines they have chosen to include: assessment, corpus linguistics, discourse analysis, language teaching, literature, second language acquisition, and the relationship among theory, research, and practice. As this list reveals, other areas of applied linguistics are notably absent: first language literacy, language planning and policy, and translation, among others. Omissions are no doubt necessary in order to compile a volume of manageable size; in spite of these omissions, readers will find the contributions absorbing and take pleasure in tracing thematic threads throughout. A sampling of major themes is outlined here.

This book, like its four predecessors, consists of invited articles selected from presentations at the previous year's International Conference on Pragmatics and Language Learning. In a review of this length, it would be unreasonable to attempt to do justice to all 18 articles, so I will concentrate on a few of the theoretically oriented discussions and provide a brief overview of the rest.

This brief volume is a contribution to the Oxford introductions to language study series, a set of nontechnical guides to various aspects of the study of language, intended for the general reader with no formal background in linguistics. This book, like the others in the series, is not intended to be a systematic introduction to its subject but rather is designed to give readers a general sense of historical linguistics and to steer them in the direction of further readings. The book is divided into four parts. The first and largest part comprises eight brief essays that treat: (a) the fact that languages evolve over time and attitudes toward them change, (b) data and evidence for reconstructing linguistic history, (c) lexical change, (d) grammatical change, (e) phonological change, (f) language contact, (g) explanations for language change, and (h) recent developments in historical linguistics. The remaining parts of the book contain brief excerpts from readings, further readings, bibliographic references, and a glossary.

David Singleton observes in the opening lines of Language and the lexicon that “almost everything in language is related in some way or other to words” (p. 1). There is little wonder, therefore, that the lexicon has been at the center of linguistic research and controversies for a long time. Organized into 10 chapters, this book offers a concise overview of major topics in contemporary research. The first chapter provides necessary background information and an overview of the volume. The remaining nine chapters cover a wide range of issues relevant to the lexicon, lexicology, and lexicography. Chapter 2 looks at the lexicon-syntax interface and introduces some contemporary approaches to linguistics and to the lexicon in particular. Chapter 3 presents basic aspects of morphology and word formation, whereas chapter 4 deals with “lexical partnerships,” especially collocations, and rudimentary information on language corpora. Chapter 5 turns to lexical semantics and problems involved in analyzing meaning, and chapter 6 briefly investigates the relations between words, sounds, signs, and writing systems. Chapters 7 and 8 focus on different dimensions of lexical change. Chapter 7 tackles the social, regional, and situational aspects of lexical variation, and chapter 8 describes lexical change, historical processes, language contact, and lexical engineering. Chapter 9 explores the mental lexicon and models of lexical processing. This chapter includes a disappointingly short section on the lexicon in SLA. Finally, the last chapter surveys key concepts and developments in lexicography.

This book, said to be written for native speakers of English as well as second and foreign language learners, is about the differences between the pronunciation of words in careful and casual speech, despite identity of spelling. It presents as models written-language texts and their phonetically written equivalents in the prestige British Received Pronunciation (RP) variety, and then provides more texts as exercise to be transcribed both ways. Almost all of the exercises are anonymously authored texts of 40 or more lines, on a variety of topics. Answers are given in an appendix. The idea is that learning to write English phonetically will improve nonnative speakers' pronunciation and, one supposes, promote the more accepting attitude of native speakers toward casual speech reductions.

This enjoyable, informative book would serve as an excellent introductory text in a beginning course on language acquisition or linguistics. The content is somewhat narrower than the title suggests: The book deals exclusively with L1 acquisition, and its focus is Chomskyan syntax and Universal Grammar, with a bit of semantics presented toward the end (i.e., phonology is not addressed). Most of the data is from English, though other languages are explored (e.g., French, Japanese), with three very interesting chapters on American Sign Language.

There exists a general belief that the ideal English teacher is a native speaker (NS). Because of this native speaker fallacy, it is undeniable that nonnative speaker (NNS) teachers have been marginalized in the English language teaching (ELT) profession. Until recently, however, the voices of NNS English teachers expressing their own concerns have rarely been heard. Non-Native Educators in English Language Teachingis the first and most comprehensive work done in the field to fill this gap. It focuses solely on the theme of NNS educators in ELT and provides a forum for language professionals to discuss the issues surrounding the NS-NNS dichotomy from linguistic, psychological, pedagogical, and sociopolitical perspectives. This anthology is unique and powerful. All of the contributors are NNS professionals from diverse linguistic and ethnic backgrounds. Because of the unique nature of its contributors, purpose, and contents, this volume makes a great impact on, and a valuable contribution to, the fields of TESOL and applied linguistics. It is powerful because the messages are coming from authorities on the theme—NNSs themselves.

The phenomenon of styleswitching has been important in the study of L1 and L2 language use. Labov's early studies correlated formal style with attention paid to speech, a notion echoed in Krashen's monitor model. Giles' accommodation theory and Bell's audience design theory claim that speakers styleswitch in order to accommodate to the speech of their audience. Several SLA scholars have found evidence for accommodation in L2 speech as well. Such correlational studies have been criticized for lacking a clear foundation in cognitive theory. In this volume Myers-Scotton describes her Markedness Model (MM), which grounds styleswitching (including codeswitching) in the cognitive theory of somatic markers (Damasio, 1994). Because speech styles are distinguished mainly by the frequency at which certain features (such as dropping a consonant from a cluster) appear, variationists have sought to identify a cognitive mechanism that could account for the apparent fine-tuning of feature frequencies. However, it is not clear from the discussion in this volume whether the somatic marker hypothesis provides such a mechanism.

This book is for teachers who instruct “the culturally and linguistically diverse learner” (p. ix, et passim) in the United States; it reflects American community relations today. The editor's intention is to “assist you [the American teacher] in creating a sociocultural context for literacy learning within your classroom community of learners” (p. xi).

The 13 essays of the present volume deal with how adults understand and how children develop coherence and textual cohesion. The collection possesses unity because the editors requested that the contributors emphasize the clause-level and linguistic markers, that they present an overview of current research, and that they show how the acquisition of particular cohesive functions manifests general principles.

Translating by factors (henceforth TBF) is an attempt at systematizing the multiplicity of factors affecting the translation process, in particular those relevant to the translation of the modals between English and German. TBF is an example of the so-called linguistic approach to translation and an illustration of why such an approach has often been criticized by translation scholars and professionals. Although it is useful to linguistics engaged in descriptive and contrastive studies of modals, the predominantly formal, sentence-based, contrastive-analysis approach embraced by the authors (who adopt, without discussion, formal equivalence as the goal to strive for in translation activity) will not be of as much use to those engaged in the teaching and practice of translation for purposes of communication. This is especially true in light of mounting empirical evidence in the translation competence literature that supports functional considerations as a dominant factor in professional translator processes.