This study examines effects of short, medium, and extended second language (L2) experience (3 months, 3 years, and 10 years of United States residence, respectively) on the production of five suprasegmentals (stress timing, peak alignment, speech rate, pause frequency, and pause duration) in six English declarative sentences by 30 adult Korean learners of English and 10 adult native English speakers. Acoustic analyses and listener judgments were used to determine how accurately the suprasegmentals were produced and to what extent they contributed to foreign accent. Results revealed that amount of experience influenced the production of one suprasegmental (stress timing), whereas adult learners' age at the time of first extensive exposure to the L2 (indexed as age of arrival in the United States) influenced the production of others (speech rate, pause frequency, pause duration). Moreover, it was found that suprasegmentals contributed to foreign accent at all levels of experience and that some suprasegmentals (pause duration, speech rate) were more likely to do so than others (stress timing, peak alignment). Overall, results revealed similarities between L2 segmental and suprasegmental learning.This research was partially supported by research grants from the University of Illinois and Brigham Young University. Many thanks are extended to Youngju Hong for her help in testing the Korean participants and to Molly Mack and James E. Flege for their advice throughout this research project. The authors gratefully acknowledge Randall Halter, Elizabeth Gatbonton, and five anonymous SSLA reviewers for their helpful suggestions on earlier drafts of this paper as well as Randall Halter for his invaluable statistical assistance.

This study investigates the effects of meaningful input- and output-based practice on SLA. First-semester Spanish students (n = 45) were assigned to processing instruction, meaningful output-based instruction, or control groups. Experimental groups received the same input in instruction but received meaningful practice that was input or output based. Both experimental groups showed significant gains on immediate and delayed interpretation and production tasks. Repeated-measures analyses of variance showed that overall, for interpretation, both experimental groups outperformed the control group. For production, only the meaningful output-based group outperformed the control group. These results suggest that not only input-based but also output-based instruction can lead to linguistic development.We thank Ron Leow, Alison Mackey, and Cristina Sanz for their continual support and valuable input throughout the various phases of this research and for their comments on earlier versions of this manuscript. Likewise, we express our gratitude to Bill VanPatten and the various anonymous reviewers for their comments on the manuscript. We also thank the Linguistics Department for the use of its laboratory and equipment during data collection and Ru San Chen for assistance with statistical analyses. Special thanks to Gorky Cruz and Cristina Sanz for the use of digital photographs. Any errors or omissions are ours alone.

This article considers the implications of two central constructs of sociocultural theory (SCT) for second language (L2) development: mediation and internalization. It first discusses Vygotsky's general theoretical claim that human mental activity arises as a consequence of the functional system formed by our biologically specified mental capacities and our culturally constructed symbolic artifacts. It then examines some of the L2 research that has investigated the extent to which L2 users are able to deploy their new language for cognitive mediation. Specific attention is given to the mediational function of L2 private speech and to the synchronization of gestures and speech from the perspective of Slobin's thinking for speaking framework, a framework that interfaces quite well with Vygotsky's theory. The second general topic addressed, internalization, is intimately connected to the first. It is argued that internalization of the features of a L2 takes place through imitation, especially as occurs in private speech. Imitation, based on recent neuroscience and child development research, is seen as an intentional and potentially transformative process rather than as rote mimicking. The research documents that L2 children and adults rely on imitation in their private speech when they encounter new linguistic affordances. What remains to be established is the connection between the linguistic features of private speech and those deployed by L2 speakers in their social performance. Finally, the article proposes that the study of how L2 learners internalize and develop the capacity to use conceptual and associated linguistic knowledge should move to the forefront of SCT L2 research and argues that a productive way of realizing this agenda is through the union of SCT and cognitive linguistics.

When understanding or evaluating foreign-accented speech, listeners are affected not only by properties of the speech itself but by their own linguistic backgrounds and their experience with different speech varieties. Given the latter influence, it is not known to what degree a diverse group of listeners might share a response to second language (L2) speech. In this study, listeners from native Cantonese, Japanese, Mandarin, and English backgrounds evaluated the same set of foreign-accented English utterances from native speakers of Cantonese, Japanese, Polish, and Spanish. Regardless of native language background, the listener groups showed moderate to high correlations on intelligibility scores and comprehensibility and accentedness ratings. Although some between-group differences emerged, the groups tended to agree on which of the 48 speakers were the easiest and most difficult to understand; between-group effect sizes were generally small. As in previous studies, the listeners did not consistently exhibit an intelligibility benefit for speech produced in their own accent. These findings support the view that properties of the speech itself are a potent factor in determining how L2 speech is perceived, even when the listeners are from diverse language backgrounds.This work was supported by two grants from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada to the first two authors. The authors thank J. E. Flege and three anonymous SSLA reviewers for their helpful comments on an earlier version of the paper as well as the listeners and speakers for their willingness to participate in the study. The listening stimuli used here were also used in a paper published in SSLA in 1997.

SECOND LANGUAGE TEACHER EDUCATION: INTERNATIONAL PERSPECTIVES. Diane J. Tedick (Ed.). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum, 2005. Pp. xxiv + 348. $79.95 cloth, $36.50 paper.

One of the most difficult, complex, and seemingly intractable problems facing second language (L2) educators, especially in the United States, has been the tendency to restrict discussions and interactions to particular areas of specialization: foreign language education, teachers of English to speakers of other languages (TESOL), bilingual education, and so on. The causes of this professional Balkanization are myriad and are beyond our concern here. What is important, in my view, is that language educators learn to cross these artificial boundaries that divide us and recognize the common concerns, themes, and issues that unite us. Tedick's edited volume is an invaluable contribution to this effort. It brings together language educators from a variety of specializations to examine the preparation of both pre-service and in-service language educators. In fact, it does even more than this because the contributors to this volume also represent a widely divergent international group as well as an interesting and valuable mix of both researchers and practitioners at different levels. The book contains a total of 18 chapters, divided into four thematic sections that deal, respectively, with the knowledge base of L2 teacher education, the contexts of L2 teacher education, collaborations in L2 teacher education, and L2 teacher education in practice. Each thematic section of the book is introduced by a brief essay by the editor, which provides both an overview of the chapters included and a sense of how the papers relate to each other and to the remainder of the volume. Although each chapter is placed in a particular thematic section of the book, it should be noted that it is clear that most, in fact, address issues that cross several—and, in some cases, all—of the four organizational themes.

LEARNING TO REQUEST IN A SECOND LANGUAGE: A STUDY OF CHILD INTERLANGUAGE PRAGMATICS. Machiko Achiba. Clevedon, UK: Multilingual Matters, 2003. Pp. xii + 223. $69.95 cloth.

This volume is one of those workhorses that could easily be overlooked. However, it represents one of the most detailed and extensive of the very few longitudinal studies of the pragmatic development of a child learning English as a second language. The learner, Yao (the author's daughter), is a native speaker of Japanese. At the age of 7, with only brief prior exposure to English, she moved with her mother to Australia, where she was immediately enrolled in a local school. Shortly after their arrival, Yao's mother began collecting audio and videotaped data of Yao playing with peers, a teenager, and two adults (a babysitter and a neighbor). Transcripts of these interactions—collected every 6 weeks over 17 months by Achiba, who was present as an observer—form the basis of the analysis. Despite the fact that Achiba continued to use Japanese with her daughter, Yao began early on to address her mother in English. Achiba was thus able to supplement the play data with a diary of additional requests by Yao to her mother as well as Yao's metalinguistic comments. Yao's requests were analyzed to determine the development of request strategies—linguistic realizations and modifications as well as variation according to goal or addressee.

PROCESSING INSTRUCTION: THEORY, RESEARCH, AND COMMENTARY. Bill VanPatten (Ed.). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum, 2004. Pp. 360. $79.95 cloth.

I have often been struck by how highly fluent second language (L2) speakers of English can make errors in, say, possessive determiner gender agreement (e.g., Chinese, French, or Russian speakers saying “his” instead of “her”) without being disturbed at all by what they have said. To me, as a first language speaker of English, the error is extremely jarring and can disrupt understanding. For the L2 speaker, the error has much less impact. By contrast, an error in lexical reference (e.g., saying “boy's” instead of “girl's”) is generally experienced as jarring and potentially disruptive, even by L2 speakers. Why, then, do L2 speakers perceive errors in linking grammatical form to meaning so differently than errors in linking lexical units to meaning? Does this difference pose a challenge for L2 instruction and, if so, how should the challenge be met?

URBAN MULTICULTURALISM IN EUROPE: IMMIGRANT MINORITY LANGUAGES AT HOME AND SCHOOL. Guus Extra and Kutlay Yagmur (Eds.). Clevedon, UK: Multilingual Matters, 2004. Pp. viii + 428. $99.95 cloth, $34.95 paper.

This volume reports a large-scale international study on immigrant languages in several European cities. The book contains 16 chapters and four appendixes. The first chapter is the introduction, in which the editors explain the content of the book and its crossnational and multidisciplinary perspectives. The rest of the chapters are grouped into three parts.

PHONETICS AND PHONOLOGY IN LANGUAGE COMPREHENSION AND PRODUCTION: DIFFERENCES AND SIMILARITIES. Niels O. Schiller and Antje S. Meyer (Eds.). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 2003. Pp. 355. $123.20 cloth.

This collection offers various psycholinguistic perspectives on the link between the processes of speech comprehension and production. Some authors in this collection approach the topic by reviewing how well existing models deal with the comprehension-production relationship; others propose new approaches, including ones that show compatibility with evidence from neuroimaging studies. The final two of the nine papers address the topic from a SLA standpoint.

APRENDIZAJE DE SEGUNDAS LENGUAS: LINGÜÍSTICA APLICADA A LA ENSEÑANZA DE IDIOMAS [Second language learning: Applied linguistics to foreign language teaching]. Susana Pastor Cesteros. Alicante: Universidad de Alicante, 2004. Pp. 374. 22 € paper.

This volume sprang from the desire to “ofrecer los contenidos necesarios para la comprensión del proceso de adquisición de una lengua no nativa, tanto desde la perspectiva del docente como desde la del aprendiz” [“to offer the necessary contents to understand the process of the acquisition of a non-native language, from both the teacher and the learner's perspective”] (p. 14). In her work, Pastor attempts to make matters of learning and teaching accessible to university students and foreign language teachers interested in applied linguistics.

HOW TO USE CORPORA IN LANGUAGE TEACHING. John McH. Sinclair (Ed.). Amsterdam. Benjamins, 2004. Pp. vi + 306. $114.00 cloth, $42.95 paper.

This is the 12th volume in Benjamins' estimable Studies in corpus linguistics series and has been edited by Sinclair, in many ways the doyen of the field. After an introduction by the editor, the collection is divided into five sections. The first four cover “The Corpus and the Teacher,” “Resources—Corpora,” “Research,” and “Resources—Computing” and contain a total of eleven papers. The final section contains a single long essay by Sinclair, entitled “Prospects.” As these headings indicate, the range of this volume is somewhat broader than a perusal of its title alone might indicate.

VOCABULARY IN A SECOND LANGUAGE: SELECTION, ACQUISITION, AND TESTING. Paul Bogaards and Batia Laufer (Eds.). Amsterdam: Benjamins, 2004. Pp. xiv + 233. $126.00 cloth, $42.95 paper.

This volume consists primarily of papers that were presented at the second language vocabulary acquisition colloquium at Leiden University in March 2002 and represents a broad scope of quantitative studies by leading scholars in the field. It is organized under three different themes: “Selection,” “Acquisition,” and “Testing.” In the introduction, the editors briefly describe the contributions and follow with several pages that illustrate how the papers diverge on the conceptualization of central issues (e.g., the basic unit under investigation; aspects of the learning process, learning conditions, and time course of measurement; definitions of the construct of word knowledge). Finally, they add their own insightful perspectives on such issues, as well as helpful suggestions for further exploration, as a stimulus for future research.

SPANISH/ENGLISH CODESWITCHING IN A WRITTEN CORPUS. Laura Callahan. Amsterdam: Benjamins, 2004. Pp. viii + 183. $108.00 cloth.

Despite a vast literature on oral codeswitching—the use of more than one language within a single conversation—codeswitching as a written literary practice has remained largely underinvestigated. In redressing this imbalance, Callahan examines Spanish-English codeswitching in literary texts from a grammatical and a discourse function perspective. The analysis of a corpus of 30 novels and shorts stories suggests that there is a “fundamental similarity” between written and spoken codeswitching and that written codeswitching “does not require a separate model of syntactic constraints” (p. 69). Callahan also argues that written codeswitching is far from an artificial literary device; not only does it fulfill the same authentic discourse functions reported for oral codeswitching but its use constitutes authors' strategic “rejection of monolingual English as well as of monolingual Spanish” (p. 145) in a redefined sociolinguistic market.

TEACHING ESL COMPOSITION: PURPOSE, PROCESS, AND PRACTICE (2nd ed.). Dana R. Ferris and John S. Hedgcock. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum, 2005. Pp. xiv + 431. $45.00 paper.

This book presents theoretical and practical issues relevant to the teaching of composition to learners of English as a second language (ESL). As the subtitle implies, the book firmly grounds the purpose of teaching ESL composition in past and current research, puts emphasis on the writing process of ESL writers, and pursues pedagogical equilibrium with equal focus on theory and practice. The book approaches broad and general themes in the first few chapters and moves on to more specific pedagogical concerns in the later chapters.

MULTIPLE VOICES IN THE TRANSLATION CLASSROOM. Maria González Davies. Amsterdam: Benjamins, 2004. Pp. x + 259. $150.00 cloth, $42.95 paper.

In recent times, translator education has, in general, tried to stay away from SLA. One of the reasons for this lies in the prescriptivist belief that students should have acquired their languages by the time they start their translation education. Yet the reality is that current translation practice throughout the world includes many cases of incomplete language acquisition, especially in immigrant communities, and that translation into a second language is common (Campbell, 1998; McAlester, 1992; Newmark, 1988). Therefore, this volume is, in principle, a relevant publication for the field of SLA.

THE ACQUISITION OF SPANISH: MORPHOSYNTACTIC DEVELOPMENT IN MONOLINGUAL AND BILINGUAL L1 ACQUISITION AND ADULT L2 ACQUISITION. Silvina A. Montrul. Amsterdam: Benjamins, 2005. Pp. xvi + 413. $150.00 cloth, $49.95 paper.

This book presents and analyzes the morphosyntactic development of Spanish in monolingual and bilingual first language (L1) acquisition and in adult SLA. Based on the principles and parameters model of generative grammar, the book addresses the nature of linguistic knowledge and examines the development of grammatical aspects such as morphology, syntax, and lexical semantics in monolingual, bilingual, and second language (L2) learners. The author argues that the underlying linguistic competence of L1 and L2 speakers is constrained by the nature of the language the learners entertain, as guided by principles of Universal Grammar. Throughout the book, the author considers different approaches concerning the nature and development of linguistic knowledge such as the continuity hypothesis—including both weak and strong versions—(Pinker, 1989), the maturation hypothesis (Radford, 1990), and the no continuity view. The author supports the continuity hypothesis by arguing that principles and parametric options continue to be available throughout the acquisition process in the monolingual, bilingual, and adult grammatical systems. In other words, the author argues that linguistic representation is fundamentally similar among the grammars of child L1, child bilingual, and adult L2 learners, and that all of these are similar to the adult target grammar.

THE ACQUISITION OF GERMAN MODAL PARTICLES: A CORPUS-BASED APPROACH. Martina Möllering. Bern: Peter Lang, 2004. Pp. 290. $52.95 paper.

Particles of the modal particle type—also referred to as flavoring, toning, or discourse particles—are a phenomenon in the West-Germanic languages that is well known for its descriptive complexity and its considerable demands on second language (L2) learners. High among the descriptive challenges ranks the fact that these particles cannot be adequately captured by structurally oriented theories of language because they cross syntactic, semantic, pragmatic, and discursive domains and nonuniquely express assumptions, intentions, judgments, and affective stances among the partners in communication. Along with real and imagined co-texts, these are highly contextualized and interpreted aspects of the languaging event. High among their acquisitional challenges ranks the fact that, in addition to their culturally and interpersonally situated and dialogic nature, they are formally ambiguous because all belong to other functional classes with divergent distributional and meaning characteristics. Small wonder that their competent use serves as a strong indicator of advanced levels of L2 ability. Small wonder, too, that researchers and instructors of German continue to explore more effective approaches to describing and teaching them.

CORPORA AND LANGAUGE LEARNERS. Guy Aston, Silvia Bernardini, and Dominic Stewart (Eds.). Amsterdam: Benjamins, 2004. Pp. 311. $119 cloth.

The papers in this volume come from the fifth TaLC meeting in Bertinoro, Italy, in 2002 and address a range of issues related to using corpora for language learning and teaching. The introductory chapter by the three editors provides an overview of the book and also recaps the conference discussion between Sinclair and Widdowson regarding the nature of authentic language and its place in language instruction. The main portion of the book is divided into three sections: “Corpora by Learners,” “Corpora for Learners,” and “Corpora with Learners.” These three sections are framed by two chapters: one by Hoey on lexical priming and a final chapter by Fletcher on using the web as a resource for creating corpora.

LANGUAGE LEARNING AND TEACHER EDUCATION: A SOCIOCULTURAL APPROACH. Margaret R. Hawkins (Ed.). Clevedon, UK: Multilingual Matters. Pp. ix + 204. $89.95 cloth, $39.95 paper.

This book, according to the editor, “took shape from discussions among language teacher educators” who were interested in “reconceptualizing and redefining their practices” (p. 3) in order to reflect a shift from viewing language learning as an object to be dissected on paper to a view of language learning as discourses embedded in and shaped by situated social situations. It was, therefore, not surprising to discover that the chapters in this edited volume are all framed within a common sociocultural perspective that views language not as monolithic but as composed of many different social languages or discourses. Traditionally, language instruction, whether it be the teaching of traditional foreign languages, English as a foreign language or English as a second language, has focused on teaching grammatical structures and has been centered around teaching one correct form.

A DICTIONARY OF SOCIOLINGUISTICS. Joan Swann, Ana Deumert, Theresa Lillis, and Rajend Mesthrie. Edinburgh, Scotland: Edinburgh University Press, 2004. Pp. x + 368. $28.00 paper.

This book is intended as a resource for sociolinguists and scholars in related fields who deal with sociolinguistic concepts. Though not specifically aimed at the field of SLA, this book is a valuable resource for scholars in that field.