ROMANCE SYNTAX, SEMANTICS, AND L2 ACQUISITION. Joaquim Camps and Caroline Wiltshire (Eds.). Amsterdam: Benjamins, 2001. Pp. x + 246. $96.00 cloth.

This volume is a collection of 15 papers selected from the 30th Linguistic Symposium on Romance Languages, organized by the University of Florida. In the introductory chapter, Camps and Wiltshire summarize the main ideas of the 14 contributions that follow, along five main subtopics: (a) movement, which includes chapters by Boeckx, Stateva, and Stepanov and Boeckx on wh-movement in French as well as a chapter on Determiner Phrase (DP) movement analysis of obligatory control structures in Portuguese by Pires; (b) the DP and SLA, a section that discusses work by Gess and Herschensohn on the DP parameter in French, adjective placement and semantic interpretation in French by Anderson, and a study on the discourse constraints on the use of null and overt subjects in Spanish L2 acquisition within an Optimality Theoretic account by La Fond, Hayes, and Bhatt; (c) word order and other syntactic factors in SLA are addressed in chapters by Clements and by Sagarra; (d) adverbials are the topic of a chapter by Abeillé and Godard; and (e) the syntax-semantics interface is examined in several contributions, including chapters on the aspectual verb ficar in Portuguese by Schmitt, on the Spanish subjunctive by Villalta, on unaccusative verbs in French by Cummins, and on impersonal reflexives in Romance and Slavic by Rivero.

Two experiments examined the learning of form-meaning connections under conditions where the relevant forms were noticed but the critical aspects of meaning were not. Miniature noun class systems were employed, and the participants were told that the choice of determiner in noun phrases depended on whether the object was “near” or “far” from the subject of the sentence. What they were not told was that the choice of determiner also depended on the animacy of the noun. Most participants remained unaware of this correlation during the training and test tasks; yet when faced with a choice between two determiners for a noun, they chose the one that was appropriate to the noun's animacy at significantly above-chance levels, even though that combination had never been encountered during training. This ability to generalize provided evidence of learning form-meaning connections without awareness. In both experiments, there was a correlation between generalization test performance and knowledge of languages that encode grammatical gender. This points to the importance of prior knowledge in implicit learning.Many thanks to Ronald Leow, Daphnée Simard, and the anonymous SSLA reviewers for their helpful comments on an earlier draft of this article.

THE HANDBOOK OF SECOND LANGUAGE ACQUISITION. Catherine J. Doughty and Michael H. Long (Eds.). Oxford: Blackwell, 2003. Pp. 888. $157.95 cloth, $44.95 paper.

This volume is one of the most recent and comprehensive collections of papers on the current state-of-the-art in SLA research. Arguing that “[a]s a widespread, highly complex, uniquely human, cognitive process, language learning of all kinds merits careful study for what it can reveal about the nature of human mind and intelligence” (p. 5), editors Doughty and Long have collected papers from 27 researchers—many of whom are the leading experts in their subfields—and organized them into seven sections.

TEACHING AND LEARNING BY DOING CORPUS ANALYSIS. Bernard Ketteman and Georg Marko (Eds.). Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2002. Pp. vii + 390. $148.00 cloth.

This substantial volume contains 23 papers selected from the Fourth International Conference on Teaching and Language Corpora (TALC) held in Graz, Austria in the summer of 2000. Like many edited conference proceedings, the chapters in this book vary quite widely in both the quality and quantity of the work presented. Further, the substance of some of the stronger contributions—such as Coxhead on academic vocabulary and Lee on a genre-specific index for the British National Corpus (BNC)—had already appeared in journals at the time of this volume's publication (Coxhead in TESOL Quarterly and Lee in Language Learning and Technology). In his opening remarks, McEnery salutes the widening range of topics in this volume, but I am less sanguine about the value of adding breadth. Certainly, the new emphasis on the role of corpora in translation studies and the teaching of translation in the final section is well motivated, but it is less clear whether Renouf's discussion of short-dimension diachronic change or Flowerdew's use of language learning diaries has much to do with the central issues in TALC.

GRAMMAR AND VOCABULARY: A RESOURCE BOOK FOR STUDENTS. Howard Jackson. London: Routledge, 2002. Pp. vii + 202. $25.95 paper.

This volume provides a readable, interactive, and complete introduction to basic areas of English grammar that includes words and sentences, parts of speech and their role in sentences, verb patterns, clauses and phrases, and areas of vocabulary including word class, word formation, and jargon. The text aims “to encourage [students] to analyze the language that [they] hear and read in [their] daily life” (pp. vii–viii). It does so in two ways. First, concepts are presented inductively; that is, readers are asked to work with language samples—many authentic excerpts of written and spoken text—in order to understand the concepts before the author explains key ideas. These interactive tasks encourage readers to play with language, drawing on and extending what they already know about English grammar and vocabulary. Second, it uses grammar terminology consistently and sparingly, a wise decision given that the book's target readers are new to the field.

TEACHING AND LEARNING A SECOND LANGUAGE. Ernesto Macaro. New York: Continuum, 2003. Pp. xvi + 284. $29.95 paper.

This volume complements practice by providing reviews of and discussions about current literature in foreign language (FL) learning. The book is based on survey results from English FL teachers about where they feel gaps need to be filled or knowledge broadened in their personal know-how and know-why. Although this book is intended for FL teachers or as a resource for heads of departments, it would also be a good reader for graduate students as an introduction to the teaching of FLs or for teacher trainers at various levels.

COMPUTER LEARNER CORPORA, SECOND LANGUAGE ACQUISITION, AND FOREIGN LANGUAGE TEACHING. Sylviane Granger, Joseph Hung, and Stephanie Petch-Tyson (Eds.). Amsterdam: Benjamins, 2002. Pp. x + 246. $42.95 paper.

Insights derived from language corpora have influenced countless aspects of language teaching, testing, research, and materials development. Granger, Hung, and Petch-Tyson have created an indispensable testament to the specific value of corpora in SLA research. A great virtue of this volume is that the corpus is treated as a tool, and the tool does not distract from the job at hand. The focus is where it should be—on features of native language, interlanguage, and target language as elucidated by corpus-based study. The corpora stand in the background, ready to serve.

This paper considers how implicit and explicit knowledge are dissociable but cooperative. It reviews various psychological and neurobiological processes by which explicit knowledge of form-meaning associations impacts upon implicit language learning. The interface is dynamic: It happens transiently during conscious processing, but the influence upon implicit cognition endures thereafter. The primary conscious involvement in SLA is the explicit learning involved in the initial registration of pattern recognizers for constructions that are then tuned and integrated into the system by implicit learning during subsequent input processing. Neural systems in the prefrontal cortex involved in working memory provide attentional selection, perceptual integration, and the unification of consciousness. Neural systems in the hippocampus then bind these disparate cortical representations into unitary episodic representations. These are the mechanisms by which Schmidt's (1990) noticing helps solve Quine's (1960) problem of referential indeterminacy. Explicit memories can also guide the conscious building of novel linguistic utterances through processes of analogy. Formulas, slot-and-frame patterns, drills, and declarative pedagogical grammar rules all contribute to the conscious creation of utterances whose subsequent usage promotes implicit learning and proceduralization. Flawed output can prompt focused feedback by way of recasts that present learners with psycholinguistic data ready for explicit analysis. Other processes of acquisition from output include differentiation, analysis, and preemption. These processes of conscious construction in working memory underpin relationships between individual differences in working memory capacities and language learning aptitude.Thanks to Rod Ellis for first suggesting that I try to write this and to the staff and students at Department of Applied Language Studies and Linguistics University of Auckland (2003), the TESOL Program Temple University Japan (2003), the Chester Language Development Reading Group, and the LOT winter school (2004) for helping me think it through. I am particularly grateful to Michel Paradis, Michael Swan, Karen Roehr, Anne Feryok, and Tamar Keren-Portnoy for pointing their giant biological cameras of consciousness at a prior draft, and for sharing their awareness with me in kindly and constructive fashion. I have learned a lot from it.

AN INTRODUCTION TO ENGLISH PHONOLOGY. April McMahon. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. Pp. x + 148. $24.95 paper.

Unlike many other introductory textbooks that focus specifically on English phonology (Carr, 1999; Giegerich, 1992; Roach, 2000), McMahon's text does not begin with the mechanics of how English vowels and consonants are produced but rather focuses first on the heart of phonology: the phoneme. Although the book is slim, it adequately covers the same topics that comparable books cover, and McMahon's strength comes from apt metaphors and clear explanations that help the reader comprehend difficult concepts.

Publications received.

TEACHING ACADEMIC ESL WRITING: PRACTICAL TECHNIQUES IN VOCABULARY AND GRAMMAR. Eli Hinkel. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum, 2004. Pp. xii + 360. $79.95 cloth, $37.50 paper.

In this text, Hinkel argues that second language (L2) writing instruction has long favored teaching the writing process and discourse and rhetorical features of text while neglecting the essential language skills that L2 writers need to succeed in mainstream university classes. She attempts to redress this perceived shortcoming by identifying and describing the formal syntactic and lexical characteristics of academic text and advocating the explicit teaching of these key structures and lexical chunks.

FIRST LANGUAGE ACQUISITION: THE ESSENTIAL READINGS. Barbara Lust and Claire Foley (Eds.). Oxford: Blackwell, 2004. Pp. xi + 442. $78.95 cloth, $38.95 paper.

The goal of understanding the processes and mechanisms by which a child acquires a first language (L1) is an ambitious one. The rapid progress in the field of L1 acquisition over the last 50 years or so, combined with the practical challenge posed by an increasingly multidisciplinary literature, presents a daunting picture to established scholars as well as newcomers. This volume, edited by Lust and Foley, is an outstanding collection of foundational readings in the philosophy and science of language acquisition. Anyone who wishes to understand the state of the field today—or has ambitions of contributing to its advancement tomorrow—will find this book a vital resource.

SECOND-LANGUAGE TEACHING: A VIEW FROM THE RIGHT SIDE OF THE BRAIN. Marcel Danesi. Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2003. Pp. xi + 172. $89.95 cloth, $49.95 paper.

Danesi proposes an understanding of second language (L2) teaching based on the characteristic differences between right hemisphere and left hemisphere processing. He argues that certain language teaching techniques are more compatible with one hemisphere or the other and suggests that successful L2 teaching involves techniques that engage initially the right hemisphere, then the left hemisphere, and finally both together. Based on the neurobiological literature, he argues that left hemisphere (L-Mode) functions are such things as pronunciation, grammar, literal meaning, sequential relations, verbal memory, and logical thinking. Right hemisphere (R-Mode) functions include prosodic systems, metaphorical and emotional meaning, spatial relations, nonverbal memory, intuitive reasoning, and associations and synthesis (see Table 1, p. 35).

WORKING WITH DISCOURSE: MEANING BEYOND THE CLAUSE. J. R. Martin and David Rose (Eds.). New York: Continuum, 2003. Pp. 293. $125.00 cloth, $29.95 paper.

As someone with only a scant background in systemic functional linguistics (SFL), acquired in passing through my work with teachers of English to speakers of other languages, I was curious to see how far this volume achieved its stated aims of describing a relatively accessible set of tools for discourse analysis informed by SFL and enabling discourse analysts to use them. My previous encounters with SFL suggested that these aims were worthy but ambitious. Indeed, although the back cover reassures us that the reader needs “no prior experience of functional linguistics,” the book is in fact written more like a handbook for readers already drawn to and familiar with the paradigm rather than as an introduction for those who are curious but uninitiated. This impression comes chiefly from the monologic stance that the authors acknowledge they have taken. That is, to make a particular “set of tools more available than they have been in the past” they have concentrated on “a tool-kit informed from just one point of view” (p. 273). The result is a resource that will be enormously useful for those who already know that they want to use these tools but less convincing for neophytes who need first to be persuaded of their usefulness.

APPLIED LINGUISTICS. Guy Cook. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. Pp. vii + 134. £8.95 paper.

This volume is the latest in the Oxford Introductions to Language study series, edited by H. G. Widdowson, and, as such, it provides a general and gradual introduction to the field through the use of intelligently crafted prose that facilitates the nonspecialist's ability to grasp the general concepts and controversies in this discipline. In this regard, Cook's book is intended for a different audience than other books on applied linguistics meant for specialists in the field (e.g., McCarthy, 2001; McDonough, 2002; Seidlhofer, 2003).

OPTIMALITY THEORY IN PHONOLOGY: A READER. John J. McCarthy (Ed.). Oxford: Blackwell, 2004. Pp. xvi + 603. $79.95 cloth, $44.95 paper.

Optimality Theory in phonology is a textbook for an advanced-level phonology course that contains excerpts from 33 important articles and manuscripts on Optimality Theory (OT). For each chapter, McCarthy adds brief introductory notes and a list of study and research questions. The introductory notes provide background information and short remarks on the significance of the selected works. The study and research questions help readers to understand the material, and some questions are challenging enough to lead to interesting topics for research. Given the rapid development of OT in the past decade, it is not an easy task to compile such a reader. Overall, McCarthy makes excellent selections, and this book would be a useful textbook for many phonology classes. This text would also be appropriate for independent study, but those who are not familiar with OT may want to read Kager's (1999) introductory textbook before reading this volume. For an in-depth survey and overview of OT and an extensive list of references, the reader is referred to McCarthy (2002).

AN INTRODUCTION TO PRAGMATICS: SOCIAL ACTION FOR LANGUAGE TEACHERS. Virginia LoCastro. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2003. Pp. xi + 366. $27.50 paper.

This book is intended as a textbook for students in language teaching training programs and fulfills this goal as a readable and comprehensive introduction to the field of pragmatics with an emphasis on topics that inform second language research and teaching. Respect for this diverse audience is reflected in the examples selected, which come from a variety of languages and social contexts. Although I am not wholly positive about some aspects of the presentation of the material, as will be shown, overall the text is one I would recommend.

LANGUAGE STRATEGIES FOR BILINGUAL FAMILIES: THE ONE-PARENT–ONE-LANGUAGE APPROACH. Suzanne Barron-Hauwaert. Clevedon, UK: Multilingual Matters, 2004. Pp. 248. $79.95 cloth, $29.95 paper.

How do families who are trying to raise their children bilingually attempt to do so, and how do they overcome some of the challenges of this decision? This is the main theme of this very readable book, which is written with a variety of audiences in mind. The book is theoretically sound even though it is not primarily addressed to the research community. The author, who has had personal experience raising children bilingually, also documents the experiences of many other families involved in this endeavor, using direct quotes from interviews and small case studies of these families as documentation for the theoretical assertions.

ASPECTS OF THE SYNTAX, THE PRAGMATICS, AND THE PRODUCTION OF CODE-SWITCHING: CANTONESE AND ENGLISH. Brian Hok-Shing Chan. Bern: Peter Lang, 2003. Pp. ix + 333. $74.95 cloth.

Are there syntactic constraints to code-switching? Based on Chan's University College London dissertation, this book argues that code-switched utterances are constrained by the same set of mechanisms that govern monolingual utterances. Building on the work of Mahootian (1993) and MacSwan (1997), Chan makes two additional claims. First, he argues that functional categories and lexical categories behave differently in code-switching. These differences lead him to distinguish between functional and lexical categories in the production process. Second, he extends his initial argument to claim that code-switching and pure languages are governed by the same set of constraints and principles not only for syntax but also for production and pragmatics.

SITUATIONAL CONTEXT OF EDUCATION: A WINDOW INTO THE WORLD OF BILINGUAL LEARNERS. María Estela Brisk, Angela Burgos, and Sara Ruth Hamerla. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum, 2004. Pp. vii + 246. $24.50 paper.

In this volume, Brisk, Burgos, and Hamerla offer educators of language-minority students assistance in addressing two perennial challenges: linking sociolinguistic theory and research to classroom practice and strengthening connections between home and school. Their offering comes as a collection of thoughtfully crafted, tested, and honed lesson plans through which teachers and students together study the linguistic, cultural, economic, political, and social factors that affect students and their learning in a bilingual and bicultural environment. They propose that close examination of the situational context of education in one's own community will benefit students, their families, and their teachers and, ultimately, promote learning.