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.

This annotated bibliography is a list of 676 journal articles, book chapters, dissertations, and ERIC documents related to the teaching and learning of second and foreign language writing. The list is a compilation of bibliographies published in the Journal of Second Language Writing during the years 1993–1997, with entries dating from 1991 to 1997. After a brief introduction, which includes the databases that were searched and the periodicals that were examined, the bibliography presents the entries in alphabetical order by author. Following an author index is a 23-page subject index to the entries.

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.

Recently, classroom-based foreign language learning, particularly as practiced in Europe, has begun moving from a focus on teaching for communicative competence to teaching for intercultural communicative competence. Like communicative competence, intercultural communicative competence includes the knowledge and abilities needed to participate in communicative activities in which the target language is the primary communicative code and in situations where it is the common code for those with different preferred languages. It also includes cognitive and affective skills and behaviors needed to engage in unfamiliar encounters with culturally different interlocutors, to negotiate one's cultural identities in light of one's roles in these encounters, and to understand the norms and assumptions underlying the various communicative activities on one's own terms.

Training Teachers in Practice is the ninth volume of the series Modern Languages in Practice, whose publications include both practical ideas and theoretical treatment on issues in language teaching and learning, such as motivation, fluency, learning strategies, and technology. This volume provides an engaging analysis of training modern (“foreign” in the North American terminology) language teachers, owing to the author's interest in (a) examining the diverse processes of reflection in the development of training programs in a range of different contexts, and (b) incorporating the teachers' own perspectives on such processes as the essence of the discussion.