It was only about a year ago, in a reckless moment of shelf-purging, that I reluctantly placed my original offset copy (circa 1975) of The Good Language Learner into the paper-recycling bin. Many of us fondly remember that big orange-covered prepublication volume, dog-eared, battered, and stuck together with tape. Now, almost two decades after the first publication of The Good Language Learner (Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, 1978) this reissue appears as part of Multilingual Matters' “Modern Languages in Practice” series. It is the first time this series has featured a reprint of “classic” (p. vii) volumes of interest to foreign language researchers and teachers.

The connection between SLA research and second and foreign language (S/FL) teaching is discussed in this paper, from the viewpoint that such a relationship is desirable and that it is advantageous to see it as one mediated by a variety of factors. At the same time, it is asserted that the relationship is presently often weaker than it should be. The conditions under which S/FL language teaching take place are identified as strongly contributing to this state of affairs, though other aspects of SLA research that might have limited its relevance to teaching are also considered. A call is made for empirical studies into the use by teachers of research.

Applied linguistics embodies a kaleidoscope of disciplines, theoretical approaches, research paradigms, and beliefs about practice. Its diversity is reflected in this festschrift honoring Henry Widdowson. The volume contains the contributions of 27 authors from five continents and, like the honoree's own body of work, represents a wide range of topics. In their introductory chapter, the editors outline the disciplines they have chosen to include: assessment, corpus linguistics, discourse analysis, language teaching, literature, second language acquisition, and the relationship among theory, research, and practice. As this list reveals, other areas of applied linguistics are notably absent: first language literacy, language planning and policy, and translation, among others. Omissions are no doubt necessary in order to compile a volume of manageable size; in spite of these omissions, readers will find the contributions absorbing and take pleasure in tracing thematic threads throughout. A sampling of major themes is outlined here.

Theories on the role of consciousness and the enhancement of noticing (Schmidt, 1990, 1994; Sharwood Smith, 1993) predict a facilitative effect of explicit knowledge, as built up by explicit instruction, on the acquisition of implicit second language (L2) knowledge. This study investigates the interaction between the presence or absence of explicit instruction and the variables complexity and morphology/syntax in the acquisition of four L2 structures. Two groups of 27 university students, differing in the exposure to explicit instruction, followed a computer-controlled self-study course in an artificial language. Results from computer-controlled posttests confirm the general hypothesis that explicit instruction facilitates the acquisition of L2 grammar. However, no evidence could be reported for the hypotheses predicting a differential effect of explicit instruction depending on the variables complexity and morphology/syntax.

When I saw that this book was a comprehensive study of the relationships across discourse, grammar, and prosody, my spirits sagged. “Oh, no,” I thought. “Not this story again.” But 20 pages into the book I realized that Lambrecht had taken a new and sobering approach to the subject, tackling a very hard subject and giving convincing answers with clear data.

The relation between experimental psychology and second language acquisition research has gone through at least two major swings of the pendulum. During the heyday of behaviorism, the pendulum swung strongly toward psychology. The behaviorist psychologists advised us to think of language learning as nothing more than habit formation (Mowrer, 1960), and second language learning materials reflected an emphasis on repetition, drill, rewards, practice, and conditioning. During the early years of the cognitive revolution, Chomsky (1959) argued that viewing language as a conditioned response (Skinner, 1957) ignores the complexities of both language structure and cognition. Persuaded by these arguments, second language researchers turned away from behaviorist psychology and sought the explanation for language acquisition in universals of language structure (Dulay & Burt, 1974).

This collection of 28 papers was first presented at the 1994 GURT. The theme of the conference was educational linguistics, crosscultural communication, and global interdependence. The vastness of the theme is reflected in the diversity of the chapter topics. Twelve of 28 deal with curricular issues. Of these, those by Kachru, Nyikos, D. Freeman, van Lier, Loew, and Richards discuss issues and concerns broadly related to the preparation of language teachers. D. Freeman's chapter is worthy of note because it offers an interesting discussion on the various strands of scholarship, which he suggests comprise the knowledge base of language teaching. Six of the 12 chapters center on curricular issues for the language classroom. Matters relating to the teaching of culture are dealt with by Oxford and Bamgbose. Brown discusses “responsive language teaching.” Citkina reports on innovative foreign language methods recently introduced in the Ukraine. A good discussion on computer-mediated communication and its usefulness to the language classroom is offered by Stauffer. Pica provides an excellent overview of the research on task-related learning and an equally useful discussion of its pedagogical implications.

This volume is dedicated to Bill Rutherford, a long-time friend and colleague, whose commitment and dedication to the study of interlanguage has inspired many of us. The various papers deal with relevant issues in the study of interlanguage with the aim of addressing the wide range of theoretical and pedagogical questions that Rutherford has tried to answer throughout his career. This multifaceted character of the book is very appealing, and so is the inquisitive and provocative tone of several of the papers. I have chosen to group the contributions under five different headings, depending on the cognitive and behavioral sciences that constitute their main focus of attention.

This collection of papers is offered to “serve as a foundation point to illuminate the range of considerations and approaches” in language test construct validation research (p. 12), and it succeeds admirably. The studies represent a useful sample of validation research questions and methods. Research methods are carefully described and motivated, and many chapters have appendices containing original research materials. Discussion and interpretation of the results seem abridged in a few studies, but collectively the chapters present a clear and useful picture of the complexity of construct validation research.

Reflections on Language Learning is a festschrift to honor the work of Antonieta Celani, a Professor of English at the Pontifical Catholic University of São Paulo, Brazil, and the foremost promoter of English for Specific Purposes (ESP) in Latin America. The book consists of a collection of 20 essays written by her students and colleagues from around the world, most reporting on studies that were carried out for the purpose of this volume. The essays are equally divided into four categories: project development, teacher education, language processing, and business interaction analysis.

Interlanguage and Learnability, the published version of Yip's doctoral dissertation, examines some salient aspects of Chinese speakers' English Interlanguage (CIL) with insights from the Principles and Parameters Theory and research in language typology. On the basis of the Subset Principle and the notion of preemption, the book addresses learnability questions of how the second language learner progresses or fails to progress in the acquisition of English. The author has presented the book carefully and logically with the goal of readability in mind, which makes the book accessible to an audience interested in second language research but with little theoretical background or knowledge of Chinese linguistics. Another commendable quality of the book is the author's ability to interrelate CIL features that can easily be wrongly treated as separate and independent and analyze them in a holistic way.

The age issue has been with us for some time, and Singleton and Lengyel's six-paper volume indicates it will accompany us into the next millennium. In the L1A = L2A spirit of the 1970s, nonlinguistic accounts for age differences were offered. Yet if factors such as anxiety or ego permeability are responsible for lack of L2 success after a certain age, studies of postpuberty failure either point to the difficulty of reducing affective factors to prepuberty levels or, alternatively, offer support for a neurobiologically based Critical Period. These studies notwithstanding, it is helpful to return to the original question: Is the outcome of adult L2 acquisition always failure?

A landscape of popular perceptions increasingly indifferent to French has sent teachers around the United States scurrying for new books that will draw students to the language they love. In many cases, the profession has fixed on Francophonie as a solution, offering, it seems, the practical, down-to-earth usefulness that the profession thinks students want and providing, at the same time, a neat link to popular and sometimes simple-minded notions of multiculturalism. Ager's new book, 6 years after his excellent Sociolinguistics and Contemporary French, demonstrates that Francophonie is far more problematic than many have thought. Less technical than the earlier book, this emphatically interdisciplinary work ought to be required reading for all prospective teachers of French.

This volume is very much in the North American tradition; it is an edited collection of papers originally presented at a conference (the Twenty-Second University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee Linguistics Symposium on Second Language Acquisition). The book represents both the strengths and weaknesses of its origins.

This book, an addition to the Oxford Handbooks for Language Teachers series, clearly falls on the applied end of the research-applied spectrum. Still, the author takes a gentle but insistent stance that research into communication provides practical insights to the classroom teacher.

Have you ever read a book and said to yourself, “Boy I wish I had that back then?” In the area of data handling and manipulation, this is that book. Davidson has compiled 30 principles by which one can effectively handle data. The audiences for this text are: “(a) graduate students and novice researchers who want to expand their knowledge of the use of computers in the social sciences, including education, and (b) educators who want to improve data gathering in their teaching institutions” (p. x). Davidson offers this book as a companion to statistical texts. If you are looking for the equation for a dependent t-test or want to review the assumptions for ANOVA, this is not the book you are looking for. If you want to know how to efficiently handle information, for instance, research data, this is the text for you.

This book is one in a series aimed at introducing teachers with little background in linguistics and applied linguistics to a range of language-related issues. Other books in the series include Introducing Applied Linguistics, Introducing Discourse Analysis, and Introducing Listening. This book by van Lier has the goal of developing “an understanding of the human faculty of language and its role in thinking, learning and social life” (p. xi). Chapter 2, “The Building Blocks of Language,” briefly introduces readers to the phonetic alphabet, assimilation, intonation, morphemes, and syntax. Readers of SSLA (who are not the intended audience) will find, because of its introductory nature, that it does not take them far in their knowledge of language awareness. Teachers new to applied linguistics will find it very accessible and easy to read.

The semantic potential referred to in the title of this book is the ability of humans to learn the (closed-class) terms for basic spatial relations, such as (for English) onto, above, and through. Regier presents a modified connectionist model of this ability designed to address three questions: (a) What kind of system can learn spatial terms? (b) How can this system function without negative evidence? and (c) What are the universal constraints on learnable spatial terms? The answers suggested to these questions are: (a) a modified connectionist network—one which incorporates structural constraints motivated by human physiology; (b) the assumption of mutual exclusion, that is, that different terms have mutually exclusive denotations; and (c) the structural constraints that are incorporated into the network.

This most recent exposition of Chomsky's ideas about the language faculty strives to reach a deeper level of explanatory adequacy. Rather than the question of “What does knowledge of language consist of?” Chomsky asks the question “Why is the language faculty the way it is?” His basic answer to this question is the following: Two sorts of conditions are imposed on the language faculty, conditions arising from its place in the cognitive architecture “bare output conditions” and conditions of conceptual naturalness such as economy, simplicity, and nonredundancy. Minimalism is thus a call for theoretical simplicity with respect to the constructs used to explain language phenomena: “It is all too easy to succumb to the temptation to offer purported explanation for some phenomenon on the basis of assumptions that are roughly of the order of complexity of what is to be explained. . . . Minimalist demands at least have the merit of highlighting such moves, thus sharpening the question of whether we have a genuine explanation or a restatement of the problem in other terms” (pp. 234–235).

This collected volume on English language teaching (ELT) in India contains 22 articles written by Indian teachers and researchers. The book has been divided into six sections. The first section—“Problematizing ELT in India”—offers a critical, historical perspective along with innovative ideas for making English language learning and teaching meaningful and purposive in modern India. The second section—“Nature of ELT Materials”—demonstrates how the ELT materials used in Indian classrooms are not embedded in local needs and indigenous contexts. The section emphasizes the importance of developing instructional materials that not only make use of the rich linguistic and cultural resources available in India but also promote effective communication skills among the learners. The third section—“Learner Profiles”—provides interesting insights into the needs, wants, and lacks of Indian learners of English. This section shows how the instruments of needs analysis developed in monocultural and monolingual settings are inadequate for assessing the needs and wants of learners in multilingual and multicultural India. The fourth section—“Classroom Issues”—focuses on certain central issues affecting teaching and learning in the classroom context, particularly the role of native language knowledge and skills that Indian learners bring with them. The fifth section—“Course Evaluation and Teacher Development”—suggests ideas for making teacher education responsive to the changing roles and responsibilities of language teachers. The sixth and final section—“Curriculum Change”—deals with the principles and procedures for curricular changes that are in tune with the evolving knowledge about learning and teaching and the increasing desire for learner control of the process of materials development and evaluation.