This paper reports the results of a study of the intonation of 18 Mandarin Chinese speakers lecturing in English. As a basis for the study, it is proposed that intonation be considered a grammar of cohesion in English discourse: Drawing from the intonational model of Pierrehumbert and Hirschberg (1990), it is argued that discrete morphemes of intonation correspond to the categories of cohesion in Halliday and Hasan's (1976) typology. The study investigated the hypothesis that the nonnative speakers who were able to use the intonation system of English most effectively would score higher on a global language test. Using a Computerized Speech Lab to measure pitch, four aspects of intonation were averaged for each speaker: (a) the pitch difference between newly introduced content words and function words, (b) the use of high pitch at phrase boundaries to link related constituents, (c) the use of pitch to distinguish contrasting items from given items, and (d) the paratone or increase in pitch range at rhetorical junctures to signal topic shift. These four measures were chosen for their contribution to the cohesion of the lectures. Multiple regression analysis indicates that the fourth intonation variable, the paratone, was a significant predictor of these subjects' English test scores. Examples are given of the other variables in context from both low- and high-scoring speakers. It is emphasized that intonation is not only a stylistic component of accent but also a meaning-bearing grammatical system.

This paper seeks to resolve certain questions pertaining to the relationship between gender and second language vocabulary knowledge. One question we examine is whether female and male ESL students at the University of California at Irvine differ significantly in their knowledge of academic vocabulary in English as measured by scores on the Test of Academic Lexicon (TAL). One hundred ninety-two freshman university ESL students participated in the study. A t test, used to investigate differences in the TAL scores of males and females, reveals that the males performed better on the TAL than the females (t = 3.32, p = .001). Analyses of covariance were used to examine questions pertaining to the effect of gender on the TAL, controlling for the possible effects of the students' verbal Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) scores, length of residence in the United States, and age of arrival in the United States. In all cases, gender remains significantly related to the results of the TAL when controlling for the other variable: for verbal SAT scores, F(1,181) = 5.86, p < .05; for length of residence, F(1,187) = 9.64, p < .01; and for age of arrival in the United States, F(1,185) = 10.22, p < .005. Neither the present study nor the gender literature reviewed suggests that gender itself causes differences in the TAL scores. In analyzing the results, we consider possible explanations for the males' better TAL scores related to reading habits, interactional styles, educational backgrounds, and cultures.

This study examines aspects of communicative classroom discourse that may affect the potential of recasts to be noticed as negative evidence by young second language learners. The database comprises transcripts of over 18 hours of interaction recorded during 27 lessons in 4 immersion classrooms at the primary level. The 377 recasts in the database have been classified according to their pragmatic functions in classroom discourse and then compared to the teachers' even more frequent use of noncorrective repetition. Findings reveal that recasts and noncorrective repetition fulfill identical functions distributed in equal proportions and, furthermore, that teachers frequently use positive feedback to express approval of the content of learners' messages, irrespective of well-formedness, to accompany, also in equal proportions, recasts, noncorrective repetition, and even topic-continuation moves following errors. The findings suggest that, from the perspective of both learners and teachers, the corrective reformulations entailed in recasts may easily be overridden by their functional properties in meaning-oriented classrooms.

This article reports on a study that investigated the effect of different amounts of planning time on the speech performance of L2 speakers. Subjects were 4 groups of learners of German (31 in total) performing 2 tasks each. The tasks varied in the degree of structure they contained and the familiarity of information they tapped. The control group had no planning time available; the 3 experimental groups had 1, 5, and 10 minutes of planning time, respectively, before they started speaking. Results show fluency and lexical density of speech increase as a function of planning time. Accuracy of speech improved with only 1 minute planning but did not increase with more planning time. Complexity of speech was significantly higher for the 10-minute planning condition only. No significant differences were found for the effect of planning on the different tasks. This study employed various general and specific constructs for measuring fluency, complexity, and accuracy of speech. The interrelationships and qualities of these measures are also investigated and discussed.

This book concentrates on the way young children's speech may vary between the pronouns I, my, and me as the subject of a sentence. For example, one child in the study at 30 months of age alternated between my and I as the subject form, as seen in these two utterances (p. 73):

(1) I like Anna,

(2) My like vanilla.

The fundamental claim is that such variation is motivated and principled. The author writes:

One might want to claim instead that the children were simply confused about the distinctions between various self-reference forms and thus might use them in free variation. (p. 58)

No one has ever claimed that children were “simply confused” when they made pronoun Case errors, and this book's lack of attention to opposing explanations for pronoun Case errors is a major flaw. For those interested in learning more about the phenomenon some important citations are Chiat (1981), Loeb and Leonard (1991), Powers (1995), Rispoli (1994), Schutze and Wexler (1996), and Vainikka (1994). Loeb and Leonard (1991), Powers (1995), and Schutze and Wexler (1996) hold that the child's inability to accurately assign Case leads to these errors as well as a host of simultaneously occurring phenomena such as inaccurate production of agreement and tense marking. Rispoli (1994) views these errors as the result of paradigm building.

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.

Can scores on L2 reading tests be interpreted as indicators of reading ability alone, or must they be considered indicators of the test takers' reading ability in addition to their knowledge of the subject matter chosen for a particular test? This book reports the results of a large-scale study investigating this question through analysis of ESL/EFL learners' performance on subject-specific reading tests.

This volume is a collection of papers presented at a conference at Stanford in April 1995. It has two sections: papers from a panel on Current Approaches to Phonological Development and papers from the general sessions. Eve Clark is to be congratulated for making the volume available so rapidly. It can still take years for some conference papers to make it to press and such delays severely limit the usefulness of such publications.

Marcia Moraes has made a contribution that will be of interest to many bilingual educators in the United States. Her book is an attempt to examine and critique contemporary bilingual education as it is generally conceptualized in the United States within the framework of a critical Marxian, poststructuralist perspective grounded in the work of Mikhail Bakhtin and Valentin Voloshinov. Thus, Bilingual education: A dialogue with the Bakhtin circle seeks to bring together two fields that have been, until this time, relatively unconnected. There is a great deal to be said for such undertakings, and both those interested in critical pedagogy and those involved in bilingual education have much to learn from one another.

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.

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.

This is a selection of papers from a conference hosted by the Irish Association for Applied Linguistics at the Marino Institute of Education in Dublin in June 1994. In an introductory paper, Rosamond Mitchell calls us to “defend and develop the professionalism of language teachers” (p. 17), which Mary Ruane amplifies to counter pessimism among language professionals arising from a feeling of a lack of control over “issues on a wider agenda” (p. 27). On the same theme, John Edwards calls for sociopolitical engagement with ethnic-minority-language situations (p. 34) and Helen Ó Murchú calls for empowerment of the “lesser used language communities” (p. 44) in a supportive response to Edwards' keynote address.

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.

Lynch, drawing on his experience of evaluation, in particular the Reading English for Science and Technology (REST) Project, aims to provide a “thorough theoretical background for the evaluation of language education programs” and “the necessary range of theory and practical techniques” (p. xi), and he highlights contributions for “program evaluation . . . in the development of applied linguistics as a field of research” (p. x).

The edited volume of the Proceedings of the 1994 Child Language Seminar has a scope both broad and ambitious. Not all participants have contributed to the volume and only one featured guest speaker's paper, A. Radford's “The nature of children's initial clauses” (co-presented with H. Clahsen) is included, so we only get a tantalizing glimpse of the conference.

This book is dedicated to “all those working for the liquidation of sociolinguistics as we know it” (p. 6). One of the dominant themes of this book is a conservative skepticism about institutional claims to a knowledge of Indian sociolinguistics—western scholars and their “Indian cohorts” (p. 31, and passim) claiming to know the multilingual complexities of India. The nine essays, most previously published, are assembled in an attempt to deconstruct some of the established paradigms of Indian sociolinguistics, especially those that authors believe are guided by western models. The authors' dissatisfaction with the use of western parameters in interpreting the social realities of India is shared by most, if not all, linguists active in research in Indian linguistics; this book presents, in one volume, critiques of the works done in the past. After reading the book, whether or not one agrees with its stated agenda or its reinterpretation of the data, it is a brilliantly provocative, sometimes polemic, revisionist account of the multilingual realities of South Asia. The first nine essays offer critiques of studies in both micro- and macro-sociolinguistic traditions. The last two essays review two books: Gumperz's (1982) Language and social identity, and Bhatia's (1987) A history of the Hindi grammatical tradition.

American Sign Language (ASL), both as the focus of scholarly study and as an increasingly popular foreign-language option for many secondary and university level students, has made remarkable strides during recent years. With respect to the linguistics of ASL, there has been a veritable revolution in our understanding of the nature, structure, and complexity of the language since the publication of William Stokoe's landmark Sign Language Structure in 1960. Works on both theoretical aspects of the linguistics of ASL and on the sociolinguistics of the Deaf community now abound, and the overall quality of such works is impressively high. Also widely available now are textbooks designed to teach ASL as a second language. Such textbooks vary dramatically in quality, ranging from phrasebook and lexical guides to very thorough and up-to-date works focusing on communicative competence in ASL.

Social linguistics is now in its second edition and has been integrated into a series of publications edited by Allan Luke entitled Critical perspectives on literacy and education. Thoroughly revising his first edition, Gee offers researchers, teachers, and students a challenging compendium of theory and analysis of language use in society. He integrates social and political relations of power and dominance into his discussion of literacies, highlighting the potential ideological conflicts between non-mainstream communities and schools, conflicts rooted in divergent uses, and evaluations of language.