Rod Ellis's latest offering addresses issues relating to the interface between SLA research and language pedagogy. To this end, the book opens with an informative and thought-provoking examination of applied SLA (research simultaneously encompassing the theory and practice of SLA and pedagogy), which, following Widdowson, Ellis distinguishes from SLA applied (extension of SLA findings to teaching). In this regard he discusses the difference between technical knowledge and “confirmatory,” often experimental, research on the one hand, and practical knowledge and “interpretative,” real world, observation-interactional research on the other. According to Ellis, the confirmatory tradition, which promotes an applied science (i.e., SLA applied) view of education, has been the dominant paradigm in the field. This tradition situates researchers at the top of the research-practice hierarchy as producers of information and locates teachers lower down on the hierarchy as information consumers.

Input, interaction, and the second language learner is, as the title suggests, a view of the relationship among input, interaction, and second language development. Susan M. Gass has written an extremely readable book that explicates many of the most discussed issues in second language learning in the 1990s. Her intention, successfully achieved, is to demonstrate where theories and frameworks coincide, not just collide.

The present cross-linguistic study deals with the relevance of principles of information organization in adult second language acquisition. It looks at typological features of information structure that allow speakers to organize and shape the flow of information when carrying out complex tasks, such as giving a description, and pinpoints factors that lead to the selection of linguistic form. At the focus of our attention are means used in reference introduction, such as existential and locational constructions, the morphosyntactic forms of expressions applied in reference maintenance, and word order. The cross-linguistic comparison shows that the options found in the expression of these functions in German, English, and Romance languages (French, Italian, and Spanish) follow distinct patterns in that the linguistic means used reflect unifying principles of a typological nature. These principles are perspective driven and are associated with patterns of grammaticization. Structures in language that reflect core principles in information organization may be difficult to acquire because learners have to recognize clusters of form-function relations that range over different domains. The nature of the analyses required is described for learners of German with English and Spanish as their source languages. The interlanguages (ILs) of these speakers show a high degree of compatibility with German in formal syntactic terms and are near native in many respects, but the levels at which the IL and target language diverge can be linked to fundamental principles of organization underlying information structure. Although the stage of acquisition is advanced, the languages still retain core principles in information structure typical of those found for English and Romance languages.

According to its authors, Teaching ESL Composition: Purpose, Process, and Practice is designed to help pre- and in-service teachers become experts in the field of L2 writing pedagogy. If readers take this text seriously and practice a healthy portion of the application activities, they should succeed in moving toward this ambitious goal. The book is divided into nine chapters, each addressing a different practical aspect of teaching composition. At the start of each chapter, “Questions for Reflection” builds schema; a summary and “Reflection and Review” questions check for comprehension at the end. Each chapter also has application activities referenced to the topic they address throughout the text and in the “Application Activity Thematic Reference Guide.” Most chapters provide figures and appendixes containing authentic samples and models. At the end of the book there is an extensive list of references including research, practical guides, and workbooks in ESL and L1 composition.

This book brings together some of the foremost scholars in pidgin and creole linguistics to address key issues confronting the field—most especially, the inability to provide generally agreed upon structural classifications of pidgin and creole languages, and in particular, less prototypical varieties like semi-creoles, post-pidgins, and post-creoles.

This book contains 16 papers that were presented at the 28th Carnegie Mellon Symposium on Cognition in 1997, entitled “Emergentist Approaches to Language Acquisition.” Emergentism assumes that linguistic properties arise from the interaction of general-purpose cognitive processes with environmental data, rather than from prewired, language-specific constraints.

During the past decade, John Schumann and his colleagues at UCLA have been pursuing a novel line of research by examining SLA from a neurobiological perspective. Several articles have reported on various phases of this extended program and now The neurobiology of affect in language offers a comprehensive summary of Schumann's theory. As suggested by the title, affect in this book is seen as central to the understanding of SLA. This is because, as the author argues, SLA is emotionally driven and emotion underlies most, if not all, cognition.

Is there an interface between explicit and implicit knowledge in L2 acquisition? Rick de Graaff's doctoral dissertation tests this question in an experimental study from a weak interface position. This position indicates that explicit knowledge has a facilitative role in the acquisition of implicit knowledge when it engages the attention of learners and makes them notice input features (Schmidt, 1990). De Graaff studies the effect of explicit computer-aided self-instruction on the acquisition of morphosyntax in Experanto (an artificial language, based on Zamenhoff's Esperanto) and Spanish (as a foreign language) by adult native speakers of Dutch. Acquisition is tested in interaction with five intervening factors that constitute a controlled linguistic, psychological, and pedagogic context (i.e., complexity of structures, rule-based learning in syntax and exemplar-based learning in morphology, familiarity with the structures, availability of explicit knowledge, and learners' aptitude). Experanto is chosen to control for the influence of previous knowledge and contact outside class, and Spanish is chosen to make the results more generalizable.

This easy-to-read paperback is the result of the author's desire to learn more about how students think and feel about themselves as learners in a “large urban college” pre-freshman ESL composition class. It is intended for teachers, scholars, and graduate students who are interested in how students learn to write as well as their accompanying thought processes and emotions. The main body of the book, chapters 4–7, presents “case studies of the journal writing experiences of five students” (p. 8) chosen to represent the variety of cultural backgrounds and personal involvement with the freewriting process in journal keeping. The students came from Colombia, Ethiopia, the Dominican Republic, People's Republic of China, and Japan.

This recent volume in the Benjamins series Language Acquisition & Language Disorders is likely to find a wide, international readership among participants in courses on SLA theory as well as among seasoned scholars in the field. As the volume underscores, phonology per se has not been given the extensive attention in second language research and teaching that syntax has experienced, and, for its title alone, the book would be a welcome addition to the literature.

This collection explores recent developments in both community and college adult ESL education to meet the needs of adult ESL learners in current social and political contexts in North America. The 22 women and 2 men contributing to the volume argue persuasively and even passionately for programs that prepare adult ESL learners for citizenry in a 21st-century democracy. Collectively and individually the chapter authors argue eloquently that adult education programs need to assist learners not only in their academic lives but also in their professional, personal, and civic lives. These teacher-scholars demonstrate what it means to be a knowledgeable, committed, and effective educator.

This book addresses issues of major concern among researchers and practitioners of second language (L2) reading, including theory of reading, testing of reading comprehension, L2 reading instruction, and methodological issues in L2 reading research. The book not only critically examines reading theories, previous studies, and conventional practice in teaching and testing, but also provides valuable insights into new forms of testing and teaching materials for L2 readers.

This collection of ten articles constitutes the fourth volume of a series, Sociolinguistics in Deaf Communities. The book's title refers to an aspect of variation in sign languages (pinky extension) and an aspect of sign language discourse (eye gaze) and underscores the richness and uniqueness of language use in Deaf communities around the world. The ten articles are distributed among the book's six sections: variation, languages in contact, language in education, discourse analysis, second language learning, and language attitudes., Although most of the articles focus on American Sign Language (ASL), one article explores grammatical constraints on fingerspelled English verb loans in British Sign Language, another examines the representation of character signs in Taiwan Sign Language (TSL) resulting from contact between TSL and written Chinese, and a third outlines historical, political, and educational issues affecting Irish Sign Language and the Irish Deaf community. The book's coverage of diverse sign language communities is enhanced by an article exploring variation in the use of “tactile ASL” by Deaf-Blind people, in which case a language ordinarily processed in a visual modality is communicated through touch.

This six-volume, beautifully bound, boxed set contains 112 reprinted papers covering the history and development of modern theoretical pragmatics from its beginnings back in the 1940s and '50s with Charles Morris, Rudolf Camap, Yehoshua Bar-Hillel, via the major works in the 1970s of those such as Stalnaker, Bach and Hamish, J. L. Austin, John Searle, and Paul Grice, to the more recent contributions of, among many others, Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson, François Recanati, and Anna Wierzbicka. The bulk of the contributions, either free-standing papers or sections from books, come out of what one might term a philosophical approach to pragmatics, but toward the end of the collection there is an attempt to cover more ethnographically rooted approaches and even to get into applied pragmatic issues related to aphasia, first language acquisition, second language acquisition (one paper), and politics.

As a result of large-scale migrations from the less developed to the more developed countries, the multilingual, multicultural school is becoming a reality, not only in cities with traditionally large immigrant populations such as New York, Los Angeles, and Toronto, but throughout North America and Western Europe. Indeed, the 1990 U.S. Census shows that one in every seven children between the ages of 5 and 17 comes from a home where a language other than English is spoken. These major demographic changes have left many teachers and other school personnel unprepared to deal with the new realities of the multilingual, multicultural classroom. Edwards' brief volume is directed to mainstream classroom teachers who, if current trends continue as expected, will spend much of their careers in even more linguistically and culturally diverse schools than exist currently. Edwards' intent is to counter widespread myths about second language learning and bilingualism, and to assist teachers maximizing the rich educational resource that the multicultural, multilingual school represents.

Braidi's new textbook is intended to provide an overview of multiple perspectives on the acquisition of second language syntax to “applied linguistics students” and “prospective L2 teachers” (preface, p. vii). After an introduction that lays a good deal of historical and conceptual groundwork, we find a chapter on “first-language and second-language interrelations” and then the core of the volume comprising a chapter each on Universal Grammar (UG) perspectives, perspectives based in typological universals, processing approaches, and functional approaches. She ends with a conclusion that summarizes major findings and discusses implications for her readership. The text includes fairly extensive references as well as name, language, and subject indexes.

Vivian Zamel and Ruth Spack have collected papers spanning 19 years of discussion on teaching academic literacy, offering an illuminating journey through the issues. In a postmodern spirit, the editors emphasize the multiplicity of literacies and the value of students' own ways of knowing. The question arises, though, why this should be specifically taught by applying a particular pedagogical model, because it appears to be a normal part of any intellectual process to fall back on previous knowledge and experience when faced with a new task. Indeed, weeding it out would seem a bigger problem, should anyone want to accomplish that. The recognition and appreciation of students' previous experiences and earlier knowledge is nevertheless welcome, and there are a few well-chosen papers narrating personal experiences of struggle between different cultural identities and logics. Yet many of the papers in this volume, particularly in its first half, tacitly seem to assume that English is the language of the world and that the North American context equals universal. Much of the discussion is dominated by a controversy between discipline-specific (genre-based or disciplinary community-based) and expressive writing, or, perhaps, rather a crusade against genre-based teaching, given that proponents of this orientation have not been given voice. From a North European perspective, this bifurcation into two opposing camps seems hard to comprehend—many of us have happily combined genre analysis, analysis of cultural differences in rhetoric, and critical discourse analysis with a view of writing as process and discovery.

Simultaneously theoretical and data-rich, this volume explores ways in which ethnic minorities grapple with conflicts related to the literacy practices of their home culture as well as those practices demanded by the dominant culture. Truly multicultural in nature, the book offers in-depth glimpses into a variety of teaching and learning contexts: how young Gujarati teenagers in England learn Gujarati (chapter 3), how Hmong parents wish their children to retain fluency in Khmer while also insisting that they attend “English only” schools (chapter 4), how Finns in Sweden and Karelias in Russia grapple with the literacy demands of the majority culture (chapter 1), how “usefulness” becomes the most crucial variable in determining the language of schooling in bi- and multilingual contexts (chapter 2), and how Vietnamese people wrestle with learning their mother tongue in Norway (chapter 8).

Nonverbal behavior has received little serious attention among second language acquisition researchers until now. Its importance is acknowledged with token attention in communicative competence frameworks and taxonomies of communication strategies, but empirical studies are few and far between. Marianne Gullberg's study of second language learners' use of gesture as a communication strategy is a welcome attempt to fill this gap.

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.