CULTURE AS THE CORE: PERSPECTIVES ON CULTURE IN SECOND LANGUAGE LEARNING. Dale L. Lange and R. Michael Paige (Eds.). Greenwich, CT: Information Age, 2003. Pp. xvii + 362. $67.50 cloth, $34.95 paper.

It may be presumptuous to assume that all foreign or second language (L2) teachers agree that language instruction must involve some degree of learning about the culture of the native speakers of the language. However, it is next to impossible to deal with L2 education without taking culture into account. Because the goal of most L2 learning is communication, culture is inevitably involved in the curriculum. Yet, many language teachers are uncertain about what kinds of cultural aspects to include in the curriculum and instruction. In fact, we are sometimes puzzled about why L2 learners find it difficult to comprehend certain linguistic features that seem apparent to native speakers. If you are a language teacher and have ever had to deal with such questions, you will be attracted by the title of this volume. Lange, one of the editors, even asserts that “culture is the driving force in the process and the content of language learning” (p. 272).

This book presents a psycholinguistic investigation of how the English past tense is interpreted by adult English native speakers (NSs) during on-line sentence comprehension. Structurally speaking, tense is a morphosyntactic category of the verb and bears semantic content: In other words, it locates the event described by the sentence with respect to the speech time and also other events in discourse. In chapter 1, Dickey presents extensive background on the semantic literature on tense and sentence processing and introduces several research questions: how and when the language processor assigns an interpretation to tense markers, whether the domain of interpretation is the sentence or the discourse, whether interpretation is assigned immediately or is delayed, and whether discourse or syntactic simplicity guides the analysis of temporal interpretation. To answer these questions, Dickey focuses on three phenomena—interpretation of aspect with temporal adverbials and adverb preposing (John had left at 5 vs. At 5, John had left), interpretation of tense in matrix contexts and temporal anaphora (Sheila had a party last Friday; Sam got drunk), and interpretation of sequence of tense phenomena (John said that Mary was sick)—which he develops and tests empirically in chapters 2, 3, and 4, respectively. In chapter 5, the conclusion, remaining questions are addressed. The book presents a total of seven experiments using a self-paced reading task, which measures reaction times at critical segments of a given sentence, to see how semantic ambiguity is resolved by the language processor.

DESIGNING LANGUAGE TEACHING TASKS. Keith Johnson. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. Pp. x + 196. $79.95 cloth, $26.95 paper.

First and foremost, readers should know that this book is not about how to design language teaching tasks. Rather, it is a pilot study of how professional task designers and teachers prepare language tasks for the classroom.

CONTEXT AND CULTURE IN LANGUAGE TEACHING AND LEARNING. Michael Byram and Peter Grundy (Eds.). Clevedon, UK. Multilingual Matters, 2003. Pp. vi + 106. $39.95 cloth.

This small volume makes connections relating the theory and practice of language teaching to sociopolitical and geopolitical perspectives as well as to a differentiated view of learners and teachers as individuals. The efforts are for the most part very successful, and this volume will be of interest to anyone working in research, pedagogical applications, and theory-building context and culture in language teaching and learning. Eight of the nine articles in the volume had their origin as papers presented at a conference at the University of Durham in June, 2001. The articles address two categories of inquiry: reports of empirical studies of learners, and procedural or methodological contributions with a focus on teachers and teaching.

This book presents a syntactic analysis of predicate types in Spanish and English and two psycholinguistic experiments on unaccusativity in these languages. Assuming the minimalist framework (Chomsky, 1995), Sanz proposes a parametric account of how event types are syntactically and morphologically encoded in Spanish and English. In chapter 1, Sanz argues that unaccusative verbs and other predicate types (transitive and unergatives) map onto different action types (activities, accomplishments, achievements, and states) in phrase structure. These event types, or Aktionsart, are encoded in the features of a functional projection Event Phrase. The features of this projection vary in Spanish and English. In Spanish, the projection has uninterpretable features and interpretable telicity features, which are checked overtly in the syntax by the clitic se, as in constructions like Juan se tomó una cerveza “Juan drank a beer” or El barco se hundió “The boat sank.” In English, the Event Phrase lacks uninterpretable features. Consequently, it has semantic content but is syntactically inactive. English calculates telicity in a projection within the VP called Transitive Phrase, where the features [±measure] are checked.

SPANISH SECOND LANGUAGE ACQUISITION: STATE OF THE SCIENCE. Barbara A. Lafford and Rafael Salaberry (Eds.). Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2003. Pp. xii + 332. $39.95 paper.

Lafford and Salaberry's new volume provides an overview of the past, present, and anticipated future of SLA theory and research on second language (L2) acquisition of Spanish. Chapters 1–6 summarize some of the major products of Spanish SLA research, whereas chapters 7–9 treat overarching theoretical concerns related to the processes involved in Spanish SLA. The final chapter examines the role of L2 instruction. This accessible work reports on major trends in the field and discusses the results and conclusions of landmark studies published during the last half century.

What characterizes the competence of multilinguals as compared to that of bilinguals? Is their metalinguistic awareness more developed? Do they find the acquisition of a fourth or fifth language easier? Cenoz, Hufeisen, and Jessner have assembled revised papers from the 1999 International Conference on Trilingualism and Third Language Acquisition in Innsbruck to present theoretical and practical dimensions of an unexplored domain, still grounded in bilingualism studies.

EXPANDING DEFINITIONS OF GIFTEDNESS: THE CASE OF YOUNG INTERPRETERS FROM IMMIGRANT COMMUNITIES. Guadalupe Valdés (with Heather Brookes, Christina Chávez, Claudia Angelelli, Kerry Enright, Dania García, and Marisela González). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum, 2003. Pp. xxiv + 226. $65.00 cloth, $24.50 paper.

As Valdés explains in the introduction, this book is about

youngsters who carry out the very hard work of interpreting and translating when they are selected by their families to mediate communication between themselves and the outside world [and the] … skills that young interpreters develop in order to mediate and broker communication between members of majority and minority communities. (p. xvii)

TASK-BASED LANGUAGE LEARNING AND TEACHING. Rod Ellis. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. Pp. x + 387. $24.95 paper.

This book is part of the Oxford University Press series in Applied Linguistics. In the preface, Ellis explains that his goal was to produce a book that “attempts to examine ‘task’ from a variety of perspectives,” noting he was striving in particular for “a rounded, balanced account of how tasks have figured in both SLA and language pedagogy” (p. ix). As Ellis also notes, the book is not a “how to” guide for the teacher or researcher but rather a text that informs about current research and practice on task-based second language research and teaching.

This book examines the acquisition of verb placement in Swiss German. In Swiss German, as in the case of German and other verb-second languages, the finite verb occurs in the second position (i.e., C position) in matrix clauses but in the final position in embedded clauses, although verb movement in certain embedded contexts such as complements of bridge verbs and indirect questions is optionally permitted. The child Swiss-German data, collected by the author, come primarily from two children—Moira (age: 3;10–6;01) and Eliza (age: 3;10—6;01)—who were acquiring the Lucerne variant of Swiss German. A positive aspect of this research is that it is based on a vast amount of spontaneous production data gathered longitudinally as well as on elicited data. These data are supplemented by data elicited experimentally from Moira's peers in her kindergarten class in Lucerne. A significant finding of Schönenberger's research is that children acquiring the Lucernese variant of Swiss German make a high number of verb placement errors in embedded clauses, in striking contrast to what has been observed in the case of children acquiring German. Specifically, the two children in Schönenberger's study move the finite verb in any type of embedded clause even when there is an overt complementizer present in these clauses. Although the embedded clauses produced by the Lucernese children do not match those in the adult grammar, Schönenberger argues convincingly that their underlying grammar is only minimally different from that of the adult grammar.

LANGUAGE ACQUISITION: THE GROWTH OF GRAMMAR. Maria Teresa Guasti. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002. Pp. xvi + 474. $55.00 cloth.

The interrelation between language acquisition and linguistic theory has long been recognized as a fruitful area of research. Guasti provides a detailed and comprehensive review of the major areas of the development of a first language and its relation to linguistic theory. The book consists of 11 chapters on the development of all areas of grammar, with an obvious emphasis on syntax. Each chapter begins with an overview of the theoretical tools necessary to understand the topic of the chapter, followed by the empirical phenomena, and a discussion that integrates the theory and the data.

ACQUISITION IN INTERLANGUAGE PRAGMATICS: LEARNING HOW TO DO THINGS WITH WORDS IN A STUDY ABROAD CONTEXT. Anne Barron. Amsterdam: Benjamins, 2003. Pp. xviii + 403. $115.00 cloth.

As its title indicates, this book should be of interest to researchers in interlanguage pragmatics (ILP) or in the effect of study abroad on SLA. With respect to ILP, Barron investigates which aspects of discourse structure, pragmatic routines, and internal modification are easily and not so easily acquired by Irish English learners of German in three speech acts—requests, offers, and refusals of offers—as well as the role of transfer and the stages of acquisition in each case. More generally, her data advance our theoretical knowledge with respect to cognitive theories of SLA (Bialystok, 1993; Schmidt, 1993). With respect to study abroad, this book is one of the first published studies (and to my knowledge the first book) that deals specifically with the effects of a study abroad experience on the acquisition and development of pragmatic competence.

BILINGUAL SENTENCE PROCESSING: RELATIVE CLAUSE ATTACHMENT IN ENGLISH AND SPANISH. Eva M. Fernández. Amsterdam: Benjamins, 2003. Pp. xx + 292. $118.00 cloth.

The purpose of this dissertation monograph is “to determine whether bilinguals, with proficiencies in each of their languages sufficient to support responsible fluency, process linguistic input by employing the routines that are followed by monolinguals of each of their languages” (p. 211). In other words, the question is whether the sentence processing of bilinguals is dependent on the language of the sentence (language dependence) or on the dominant language of the bilingual (called language independence). The study first identifies a sentence type with crosslinguistic processing differences and then seeks to determine whether monolinguals and bilinguals process those sentences differently in online (early phase) and offline (postsyntactic) tests.

CONTROVERSIES IN APPLIED LINGUISTICS. Barbara Seidlhofer (Ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. Pp. ix + 346. £22.05 paper.

Echoing Bakhtin's assertion of the importance of a dialogic approach to the study of language and literature and Kramsch's (1995) view that exploring differences is more important than achieving consensus, Seidlhofer's book focuses on the analysis of a collection of readings from original works by authors with opposing views on several topics in applied linguistics.

Phonetics belongs to the Oxford series entitled Introduction to language studies edited by H. G. Widdowson. Widdowson states in the preface that the purpose of this series is “not to supplant but to support the more academically oriented introductions to linguistics: to prepare the conceptual background” by providing “a general context in reference to which detail makes sense” (p. vii). The book is divided into four sections: a survey, which is written to be readable and informative; a collection of readings extracted from the specialist literature, which extends the concepts presented in the survey; a list of references; and a glossary, which is cross-referenced to the survey.

SECOND LANGUAGE ACQUISITION AND UNIVERSAL GRAMMAR. Lydia White. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Pp. xiv + 316. $65.00 cloth, $24.00 paper.

Actually, I could justifiably end my review here. Lydia White has come out with a new textbook on Universal Grammar (UG) and SLA; buy it. End of story. Still, I have 724 words left, so for those readers whose SLA research has been conducted on a different planet, let me pad things out a bit.

DISCOURS, ACTION ET APPROPRIATION DES LANGUES [Discourse, action, and appropriation of languages]. Francine Cicurel and Daniel Véronique (Eds.). Paris: Presses Sorbonne Nouvelle, 2002. Pp. 286. €19.00 paper.

As the words “discourse” and “action” in the title suggest, this volume focuses on the pragmatic aspects of SLA with a selection of refereed articles from the 1999 conference Acquisition d'une langue étrangère: perspectives et recherches “Acquisition of a foreign language: Perspectives and research” with the theme Usages pragmatiques et acquisition d'une langue étrangère “Pragmatic uses and acquisition of a foreign language.” In the introduction, the editors provide a brief overview of SLA research with a clear emphasis on pragmatic issues—for example, differences between naturalistic and classroom acquisition in terms of social contexts and interactional patterns. The volume contains three thematic sections followed by an epilogue featuring the written version of three contributions that served as a synthesis at the end of the conference. Each section is followed by grouped bibliographic references. This particular organization is a little off-putting, especially because this editorial choice is never clearly mentioned in the text. Further, the reference sections are somewhat sloppy with spelling inconsistencies for author names (Vygotski and Vygotsky), publication dates in the bibliography that do not always correspond to the article citations, and several in-text references omitted from the bibliography.

Papua New Guinea (PNG), with its 842 languages among its roughly 3.8 million inhabitants, constitutes the most linguistically complex society in the world. Of the various lingua francas used in PNG for communication among speakers of different languages, the English-based Melanesian pidgin Tok Pisin—originally brought to PNG in the late 1800s by New Guinean laborers from plantations on Samoa—has become a national language and one of the most widely used language varieties in the country. As a pidgin, it is mostly used as a second language (L2), although it is increasingly becoming a native language (L1) of many younger generation speakers. This nativization of Tok Pisin has been less an object of study than its use as a lingua franca.

AUDIBLE DIFFERENCES: ESL AND SOCIAL IDENTITY IN SCHOOLS. Jennifer Miller. Clevedon, UK: Multilingual Matters, 2003. Pp. xv + 200. $89.95 cloth, $29.95 paper.

Jennifer Miller's book is a case study that focuses on students' spoken English, how students are “heard” or become “audible” in the mainstream context, and the relationship between this audibility and identity formation. The twist, and one of the major contributions of this work, is Miller's careful theoretical positioning. She is working in the space where theories of identity formation and SLA overlap to paint a more complex and interesting picture of language acquisition than any of the theoretical frameworks could accomplish alone.

Birch's volume on how first language (L1) features such as its orthographic system, phonology, or morphology exert a significant influence on an ESL/EFL reader's performance is an invaluable contribution to the complex and complicated issue of assisting learners of other languages (particularly those from languages with different writing systems) in the process of becoming more efficient and effective readers. This book is relevant to “all ESL and EFL practitioners … teaching illiterate people to read in English or to those whose students already know how to read in their native language” and to “reading researchers, curriculum designers and material writers” including “teachers-in-training” (p. x).