The present study examines classroom learners' course of grammatical development in acquiring the interpretive correlates of variable adjective position in French. Eventual attainment of the target language system requires not only knowledge of linear word-order possibilities within the determiner phrase that differ from their native language (English) but knowledge of the interpretive differences between the two orders as well. Results from a contextualized acceptability judgment task administered to monolingual English-speaker controls, four groups of university-level learners of French, and native-French-speaker controls (N = 157) show that adjective position-interpretation pairings are eventually acquired, although with a high degree of between-learner variability in rate. Based on an analysis of both individual and group acceptance rates, I argue that eventual attainment of the second language system requires a priori knowledge of a specific representational format—supporting the notion of the domain-specificity of language as pursued in generative accounts of SLA—but that the course of grammatical development is affected by a number of group- and learner-specific variables that mediate depth of processing (following Gass, 1997).I am indebted to a number of individuals who helped me bring this manuscript to publication, including Laurent Dekydtspotter, the director of my 2002 dissertation at Indiana University, where the research presented in this manuscript was begun; several anonymous SSLA reviewers, who provided insightful and constructively critical comments; and the editorial staff of SSLA, who provided much encouragement and showed great patience.

Interaction research that has investigated the relationship between language production and second language (L2) development has largely focused on learners' immediate responses to interactional feedback. However, other speech production processes might help account for the beneficial relationship between interaction and L2 development. The current study examines whether syntactic priming—the tendency to produce a syntactic structure encountered in the recent discourse—is associated with English as a second language (ESL) question development. The participants were intermediate-level Thai learners of English (N = 46) at a large public university in northern Thailand. In two 20-min sessions, the participants carried out communicative activities with a more advanced L2 English interlocutor who had been scripted with developmentally advanced question forms. They also completed an oral pretest and two posttests that consisted of activities similar to those carried out during the treatment sessions. The results indicated that participants who evidenced high levels of syntactic priming were likely to advance to a higher stage in the developmental sequence of ESL question formation.

This study investigates factors that affect the accuracy of tone production by American students of Vietnamese as a second language (L2). Nine hypotheses are examined, each of which isolates a factor expected to affect production accuracy: (a) task type, (b) the position of a tone in a clause, (c) discourse distance between a model provided by a native speaker and the learner's utterance, (d) markedness relationships of the tones, (e) emphasis, (f) the preceding and following tones in the string, (g) voicing of the initial consonant, (h) postvocalic elements in the syllable, and (i) vowel height. The findings show that the patterns of tone production by the American learners of Vietnamese are influenced by universal mechanisms of phonetics and phonology, first language structures, and L2-specific rules. The results also provide a framework for determining the difficulty of tones in different environments.We would like to thank the students and teachers at the Southeast Asian Studies Summer Institute at the University of Wisconsin-Madison for their participation in this study. We thank Richard Young, the late Craig Chaudron, and the anonymous SSLA reviewers for helping us strengthen this paper. We are responsible, however, for any errors that remain.

This study investigated the relationship between receptive and productive vocabulary size. The experimental design expanded upon earlier methodologies by using equivalent receptive and productive test formats with different receptive and productive target words to provide more accurate results. Translation tests were scored at two levels of sensitivity to measure receptive and productive knowledge of meaning and form. The results showed that total receptive vocabulary size was larger than productive vocabulary. When responses were scored for fuller knowledge, receptive vocabulary size was also found to be greater than productive vocabulary size in each of three word frequency bands, with the difference between receptive and productive knowledge increasing as the frequency of the words decreased. However, when responses were scored for partial knowledge, there was little difference among vocabulary sizes at each frequency band. The findings also indicated that receptive vocabulary size might give some indication of productive vocabulary size. Learners who have a larger receptive vocabulary are likely to know more of those words productively than learners who have a smaller receptive vocabulary.

DO NOT LEAVE YOUR LANGUAGE ALONE: THE HIDDEN STATUS AGENDAS WITHIN CORPUS PLANNING IN LANGUAGE POLICY.Joshua A. Fishman. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum, 2006. Pp. xi + 158. $22.50 paper.

Although it does not directly target the field of SLA, this volume provides invaluable information, related to various language practices in the world, that would enrich SLA researchers' knowledge. In language policy, making the distinction between corpus and status planning is one way to differentiate decisions relating to language use and language choice (Shohamy, 2006; Spolsky, 2004; Wright, 2004). In this volume, Fishman, however, notes that the two types of language planning are not as fundamentally separate as has traditionally been assumed to be the case; rather, they are linked in a variety of ways. According to Fishman, the nature and direction of corpus planning reflects and is guided by the status-planning environment.

ISSUES IN TESTING BUSINESS ENGLISH: THE REVISION OF THE CAMBRIDGE BUSINESS ENGLISH CERTIFICATES. Barry O'Sullivan. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Pp. xiv + 394. $34.00 paper.

Testing language for specific purposes (LSP) is critical for understanding how an individual's language performances might vary from situation to situation, with different test tasks, or both. Researchers and language test practitioners are faced with a complex task when designing field-specific tests and implementing viable test methods in which field-specific contextual constraints arise. This volume reviews the challenges and changes to accommodating these influences and provides methodologies for the revision of the Business English Certificates (BEC). Divided into five chapters, the volume opens with a brief historical introduction to the testing of language for business purposes. The first chapter seeks to provide an overview of some of the central issues in LSP facing language testers today by embedding practical considerations in a theoretical context and by reviewing tests of business language (e.g., Test of English for International Communication, Pitman Qualifications, and London Chamber of Commerce and Industry Examinations Board tests). Also discussed are tests of language for business and commerce in languages other than English. From a systematic point of view, the volume discusses the construct upon which each test focuses, the test method, skills coverage, measurement qualities, degree of specificity and situational authenticity, impact of nonlanguage factors, and score reporting. Furthermore, the development of business English testing at the Cambridge English for Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL; e.g., Certificate in English as a Foreign Language for Secretaries, Certificate in English for International Business and Trade, Oxford International Business English Certificate, and Business Language Testing System) is discussed at length.

INTERFACES IN MULTILINGUALISM.Conxita Lleó (Ed.). Amsterdam: Benjamins, 2006. Pp. vii + 283. $90.00 cloth.

This volume includes papers from two bilingualism and multilingualism colloquia held at the Research Center on Multilingualism at the University of Hamburg. All of the papers discuss the interface of diverse areas of linguistics that are usually discussed and debated independently. As Lleó mentions in the foreword, although these phenomena are indeed interesting when studied separately, the results are even more fascinating when the interactions between the subgroups are examined.

PROGRESSIVES, PATTERNS, AND PEDAGOGY: A CORPUS-DRIVEN APPROACH TO ENGLISH PROGRESSIVE FORMS, FUNCTIONS, CONTEXTS AND DIDACTICS.Ute Römer. Amsterdam: Benjamins, 2005. Pp. xi + 328. $156.00 cloth.

The 18th volume in the Studies in Corpus Linguistics series, this work is a welcome contribution to the fields of corpus linguistics and language teaching. The volume, based on Römer's dissertation, thoroughly describes the results of two related, corpus-driven studies that provide a detailed description of the progressive in natural use in addition to its use in so-called school English. The first study is a comparison of two spoken corpora of native-speaker British English (both conversation), whereas the second is an analysis of school English, a corpus of conversational English appearing in two English as a foreign language textbook series used in Germany. The beginning chapters (2 and 3) provide the theoretical rationale, followed by the methods and results (4–6), and the final chapters (7 and 8) conclude the volume with pedagogical implications and general conclusions.

PROBLEMS IN SLA.Michael H. Long. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum, 2007. Pp. v + 201. $75.95 cloth, $27.50 paper.

Long's lengthy and productive career as a specialist in SLA affords him exceptional experience and perspective to write about the field, and his latest work does not disappoint. This volume is divided into three sections of unequal lengths: “Theory,” “Research,” and “Practice.” There is a copious list of references, and Long introduces many interesting citations and topics that are new, even to a veteran scholar like me.

IDEAS AND OPTIONS IN ENGLISH FOR SPECIFIC PURPOSES.Helen Basturkmen. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum, 2006. Pp. xi + 186. $19.95 paper.

Various approaches to teaching English for specific purposes (ESP) are examined in this volume, with a view toward encouraging readers to take a critical stance. The work aims to fill a gap in the existing ESP literature, which Basturkmen argues has “tended to focus on practical issues” rather than on “ideas of learning languages for specific purposes” (p. 5). Another goal is to investigate whether “ESP has been a force for accommodation” (p. 6), serving the interests of discourse communities rather than ESP learners themselves.

RAISING BILINGUAL-BILITERATE CHILDREN IN MONOLINGUAL CULTURES.Stephen J. Caldas. Clevedon, UK: Multilingual Matters, 2006. Pp. xvi + 231. $39.95 paper.

Caldas's work tells the story of his three children's language development over the course of 19 years. Caldas is a native English speaker from Louisiana and a fluent but nonnative speaker of French. Caldas's wife hails from Quebec and is a native French speaker, also fluent in English. Their three children—a boy and twin girls who were born 2 years later—were raised in suburban Louisiana with extended French-immersion vacations in Quebec. Caldas and his wife attempt to make their home a French-only environment by adopting a family language policy of speaking only French themselves and by promoting French-language books, television, and media. Whereas they are successful throughout the children's early years, their project meets resistance when their eldest boy reaches about 10 and begins to reject everything French. The younger girls soon follow in his footsteps. With patience, perseverance, and regular extended visits to French-speaking Quebec, this phase passes, and by the volume's happy ending, all three children become bilingual and biliterate teens (and presumably adults).

CALLING ON CALL: FROM THEORY AND RESEARCH TO NEW DIRECTIONS IN FOREIGN LANGUAGE TEACHING.Lara Ducate and Nike Arnold (Eds.). San Marcos, TX: Calico, 2006. Pp. 351. $24.95 paper.

So far, language educators and researchers have proposed quite a few theoretical conceptualizations of the potential of technology in language education and have conducted empirical studies exploring the affordance and constraints of technology in language education. The large number and variety of publications on this topic is informative but might also be overwhelming to language teachers, and many teachers are at a loss as to how exactly to incorporate technologies into their daily practice despite being intrigued by all of these claims and findings on the promise of technology. This volume, edited by Ducate and Arnold, provides timely support to language teachers. This practice-oriented volume not only gives language teachers broad perspectives on the status quo of computer-assisted language learning (CALL) but also provides specific guidelines on how to incorporate technologies in specific language teaching areas.

TEACHING THE DIMENSIONS OF LITERACY.Stephen B. Kucer and Cecilia Silva. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum, 2006. Pp. xv + 406. $49.95 paper.

Kucer and Silva's work is a companion volume to Kucer's (2005) earlier volume, Dimensions of Literacy: A Conceptual Base for Teaching Reading and Writing In School Settings, now in its second edition. In this earlier volume, Kucer argued that literacy should be understood in all its dimensions—cognitive, linguistic, sociocultural, and developmental—and that to reduce our understanding of literacy to any one dimension alone is to lack wisdom about its total nature. Whereas the previous volume offers a theoretical exposition of these four dimensions of literacy (i.e., content knowledge for teachers), this new work provides answers to the question “Well, now that I am equipped with a multidimensional understanding of literacy, what shall I do on Monday morning?” (i.e., pedagogical content knowledge; Shulman, 1986).

ACQUIRING A NON-NATIVE PHONOLOGY: LINGUISTIC CONSTRAINTS AND SOCIAL BARRIERS.Jette G. Hansen. New York: Continuum, 2006. Pp. 197. $160.00 cloth.

Hansen's monograph concerns the phonological development of two Vietnamese adults acquiring English as a second language (L2). Data collection began 1 year after the couple's immigration to the United States and continued for a period of 1 year. The focus was on the developmental sequences involved in the acquisition of English syllable-initial and syllable-final consonant singletons and clusters, which are challenges to many L2 learners. In Vietnamese, syllable-final phones are limited to plosives, nasals, and semivowels; there are no consonant clusters.

INQUIRIES IN LINGUISTIC DEVELOPMENT: IN HONOR OF LYDIA WHITE.Roumyana Slabakova, Silvina A. Montrul, and Philippe Prévost (Eds.). Amsterdam: Benjamins, 2006. Pp. vi + 363. $156.00 cloth.

As noted by one of the contributors to this Festschrift volume, Lydia White is widely regarded as the ostensible mother of research in SLA from a generative linguistics perspective. This volume consists of an introduction and 14 chapters edited and written by McGill University alumni who have studied with White. The collection covers an impressive range of topics, mostly in generative SLA, in various linguistic domains including phonology, morphosyntax, lexical and formal semantics, the syntax-discourse/pragmatics interface, and language processing. There are also chapters on first language (L1) acquisition, third language acquisition, bilingualism, and language attrition among heritage language speakers.

TEACHER COLLABORATION AND TALK IN MULTILINGUAL CLASSROOMS.Angela Creese. Clevedon, UK: Multilingual Matters, 2006. Pp. ix + 217. $119.95 cloth, $49.95 paper.

The roles of teachers and their collaboration in multilingual classes in three secondary schools in the United Kingdom are explored in this volume. It is an ethnographic study conducted inside the schools, based on observation and interviews. Creese provides a critical analysis of the relationship between language teachers and subject teachers. The insights of this work can be useful for many other multilingual schools in other contexts in which teachers work together in the same classroom and for schools with native language assistants or teachers for students with special needs who work in collaboration with subject teachers.

MIND AND CONTEXT IN SECOND LANGUAGE ACQUISITION.Cristina Sanz (Ed.). Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2005. Pp. xii + 302. $49.95 paper.

This edited collection emanates from a course taught by the editor, Sanz, at Georgetown University. Its chapters are derived from guest lectures given by her colleagues at Georgetown as well as one by VanPatten. The uniting theme of the volume, therefore, seems to be the Georgetown faculty's interests, rather than a specific intellectual focus or theoretical orientation that, broadly speaking, takes a cognitive perspective on second language (L2) learning. Nevertheless, the volume packs in an impressive and wide-ranging amount of information, and most of the chapters stand on their own as extremely valuable tutorials on the topics that they cover—although it is not clear that the intended audience for each of the chapters is the same. One of the most useful features of this volume is the excellent guided critiques at the end of each chapter, which lead those new to the research area through a sample study.

DEVELOPING LITERACY IN SECOND-LANGUAGE LEARNERS: REPORT OF THE NATIONAL LITERACY PANEL ON LANGUAGE-MINORITY CHILDREN AND YOUTH.Diane August and Timothy Shanahan (Eds.). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum, 2006. Pp. vii + 669. $65.00 paper.

This is the outcome of work by the National Literacy Panel on Language-Minority Children and Youth. The panel included experts from the United States and Canada selected by the Institute of Education Sciences. The topics addressed include second language (L2) development, cognitive development, curriculum and instruction, assessment, and methodology. Concerned with how best to improve literacy achievement for language-minority students, the collection is a synthesis of more than 200 systematically selected research reports on the development of literacy for language-minority students. The panel (with August as principal investigator and Shanahan as Chair) undertook a comprehensive review of studies on language-minority students based mainly in the United States but also incorporated studies from the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, the Netherlands, Finland, and Israel.

UNITY AND DIVERSITY IN LANGUAGE USE.Kristyan Spelman Miller and Paul Thompson (Eds.). New York: Continuum, 2002. Pp. 224. $60.00 paper.

This collection of 13 papers from the annual meeting of the British Association of Applied Linguistics held in 2001 covers a broad range of topics, including doctor-patient communications, students' interpretations of teachers' gestures, and measuring the lexical complexity of texts. A theme that runs throughout the collection and foreshadows an area of much current interest is the notion of voice and identity.

EARLY TRILINGUALISM: A FOCUS ON QUESTIONS.Julia D. Barnes. Clevedon, UK: Multilingual Matters, 2006. Pp. vii + 256. $84.95 cloth.

Do children who acquire three languages from an early age acquire them as if they were learning each language separately or as one linguistic system? How does the acquisition process evolve when considering three languages as different as English, Spanish, and Basque? These are two of the questions raised by the volume under review.