This survey is primarily an update of the review published in ARAL I, (Kaplan 1981:2-24). The research on various aspects of bilingualism during the last five years shows three main characteristics. First, there is questioning of some basic concepts which are still considered, as it were, sacrosanct by researchers for the description and analysis of bilingualism--individual and societal--and for actual fieldwork (cf., section 2 below). In such questioning--however mute at present--several theoretical and methodological sacred cows are under attack. Second, one notices a shift in the areas of research towards experimentation, with more precise methodology and techniques, to answer questions concerning the bilingual's brain (cf., sections 5 and 6). Third, there are insightful breakthroughs in crosscultural and cross-linguistic research with serious applied orientation (cf., sections 10 and 11) and, equally important, there is concern for a social commitment in such research. True, in this intense research activity there are very few questions asked which may be considered as breaking new ground. However, the newness lies in the answers which are provided to old questions. In these answers, we notice many fresh insights gained through a wealth of cross-cultural data, through the results obtained from longitudinal studies (e.g., Hakuta and Diaz in press, Rosier and Holm 1980), through the experiments conducted with highly refined and sophisticated tools and techniques of data collection and data analysis, and through increasing understanding of the bilinguals' and monolinguals' neuropsychological processes.

The conflict between traditional and Western values is the key to understanding official language policies as well as popular attitudes regarding language in the Arab world. Traditional values are associated with the Arabic language and Islam, the two major pillars of Arab nationalism. Western values represent colonialism and oppression on the one hand and modernity and technology on the other. The issues dominating language policy in the period following World War II, during which most Arab countries became independent, are treated by Altoma (1970). Since many of these issues continue to be the subject of discussion, I will limit my coverage to the literature which appeared since 1970.

Johann Gottfreid Herder illustrated how problematic language maintenance predictions can be with his prediction in his essay, On the Origin of Languages, stating that Hungarian would briefly disappear from the surface of the earth as if it had never existed. With over 10 million speakers today in Hungary, another 4 million outside the nation, and a growing population (Hungarians in the Outside World 1993), Herder's prediction remains hyperbolic, yet it illustrates how dangerous such predictions about language maintenance can be. Hungarian, as with other languages, has been maintained because of forces operating in the unique history of the nation.

Magnet schools have had a significant influence on second language learning in the last two decades. Designed to reduce racial isolation by attracting students to a desegregated setting, magnet schools offer an attractive option for parents willing to consider alternatives to their neighborhood school. Since the 1970s and continuing through today, school systems have found that second language programs are an effective means of drawing parents and their children to new school settings. As a result, language magnets have proliferated and have had a profound impact on language instruction throughout the U.S.

The problems of research into communicative language teaching are a special case of the problems facing research into any kind of foreign language pedagogy. They also overlap to a considerable degree with those facing any research in teaching, regardless of subject matter. This article reviews a range of research approaches which have been, or might be, used in researching various dimensions of communicative language teaching. It draws on the general literature on educational research methods to some extent, and on the general language pedagogy research literature, as well as on the growing body of research literature on communicative language teaching. This is not an exhaustive survey, however; instead, a limited number of studies are chosen for discussion so as to exemplify the major research problems and approaches.

This review has as its major scope language policy as it has been practied in the province of Taiwan of the Republic of China (ROC). Language policies of the nation from 1911 to 1949 (i.e., from the establishment of the republic in the Mainland to the time when the central goverment of the ROC moved to Taiwan) will also be reviewed as they bear significantly upon the current policies. The reason for this is quite obvious, since the current policies are the result of a continuous evolution of policies in the past. In the following sections three areas will be presented: 1) a brief sociolinguistic profile of the major and minority languages in the ROC; 2) the functional allocation of languages; 3) the language policies as actually practiced today.

Macrosociolinguistics deals with the domain of linguistic behavior in such institutions as political parties, governmental administrations, and other nationwide organizations. It has to do with the distribution of language varieties in such institutions; and it has to cope with standards of planning the language situation. It is, therefore, the area of scientific national differentiation and of the study of normative language use in large institutions.

It is quite evident that the study of phonological issues within second language acquisition [SLA] research has been vitalized in recent years and is attracting wider interest today than it did a decade ago. This can be seen in the major journals in the field, and also in the fact that compensive anthologies solely devoted to the phonological domain of SLA research have begun to appear (Ioup and Weinberger 1987, James and Leather 1987). Since this review is intended to concentrate on works from the last few years (mostly from 1986 on), it is worth pointing out that this period does not in itself mark a radical shift or reorientation towards new research issues. Rather, it is mainly a continuation of topics that originated a few years back, and a consolidation of a field of research which is gradually becoming more established.

The 1970s have ushered in a new phase in approaches to language planning; the preference for a less provocative term such as language policy is indicative of this. There is now a decline in the use of terms such as language planning and language engineering: this is as it should be. For almost tow decades, language planning was presented as a cure-all for culturally and lingustically pluralistic societies in the developing Asian, African, and other non-Western countries. The term was overused, and its applications exaggerated. But this enthusiasm was not shared by all; serious practitioners were conscious of the limitations of the claims and the complexities of the task. This changed attitude has naturally contributed to a reassessment and re-evaluation of these earlier claims. There is now a much better understanding of the linguistic, political, sociological, and attitudinal constraints on language policy formation. The availability of greater cross-linguistic empirical data makes comparative observations more meaningful. As a consequence, the term language planning is now used with caution, with restricted generalization, and with an appreciation of the complexity of each situation. It has rightly been recognized that the task is more complex than linguists can handle within the traditionally conceived boundaries of their discipline, for example, in the work of the venerable Einar Haugen, or more recently, in the work of Charles Ferguson, Joshua Fishman, and others.

As elements of interethnic relations, multilingualism and language contact have always played important roles. Only in recent years, however, have problems of multilingualism come to the attention of the wider public and state authorities. This attention is due partly to the spread of information about multilingual affairs and partly to the demands, expressed increasingly vocally by speakers of minority languages, that their status be safeguarded. The majority of the countries in the world have a multinational and multilingual population (Mackey 1976: 68 ff., Grimes 1992:10 ff.), and the major industrialized states are no exception. The United States of America, India, China, Britain, Spain and the former Soviet Union are commonly known to be multilingual states, but the fact that France, Germany, and Japan also fall into this category, is not as commonly known.

Most of what we know about sign language we have learned over the past ten years, although the phenomenon of communicating with the hands and eyes rather than with the mouth and ears has existed, no doubt, throughout history whenever and wherever there have been groups of deaf adults and/or children. The reasons why sign language has been so neglected are intimately connected with the attitudes and beliefs society has evolved about the nature of language, both in terms of what language is and what it signifies, such as the beliefs that language is the hallmark of human evolution, language is thinking, language is an auditory and oral phenomenon. Within this context, sign language is not language, and communicating with sign language rather than spoken language comes replete with a host of negative implications. It comes as no surprise, then, that the people throughout history who have been in the best position to study and describe sign language––deaf people and people whose profession is deafness––have devoted most of their time and energy to defending sign language rather than analyzing and describing it.

Various facets of the general topic of multilingualism have been dealt with in previous ARAL volumes and as a major substantive focus in Volumes 6 and 14. Nonetheless, it does not seem at all surprising that we return to the topic in Volume 17 given the worldwide incidence of the phenomenon and the attention, and often controversy, which it arouses. Despite pressures and influences toward commonality from a seemingly pervasive mass media, the residents of the world continue to speak an amazing array of mutually unintelligible languages (see, for example, Bright 1992, Cheshire 1991, Comrie 1987, Edwards 1995). These languages vary in typological characteristics, geographical spread, and number of speakers. If written, they also vary in terms of the type of system that is used to record them (e.g., alphabetic, logographic, syllabic-alphabetic).

As I write the introduction to my penultimate volume of the Annual Review of Applied Linguistics, I find myself grateful for three aspects of the job. First, I have learned so much about research that I did not know existed, in the case of this issue, linguistic landscape research. Second, I am grateful for colleagues who, while experts in their specific areas, have an amazing breadth of knowledge of the field of applied linguistics. Such individuals are rare finds, and I am lucky to have several such people on my editorial board. Finally, I would not be able to put together issues on certain topics without the help of colleagues whom I have called upon for brainstorming sessions. I am thankful for colleagues who are so willing to help. For this issue, I thank, in particular, Jasone Cenoz.

Understanding social justice as it relates to linguistic discrimination and identity requires consideration of both production and perception. As linguists and cognitive psychologists become more attuned to talking about social justice, the need to discuss linguistic human behaviors through a sociocognitive lens becomes more pertinent than ever. This article offers a sociocognitive approach to linguistic analysis as a means to combat linguistic discrimination in the pursuit of social justice. Having negative ideologies about a particular group of people, especially a minoritized group, influences linguistic prediction and perceptions. Together, sociolinguistic and psychological methodologies are necessary to navigate a world in which people use linguistic knowledge to make decisions and predictions about their interlocutors. I use sociocognitive approaches as vehicles for social justice, centering African American English and Anti-Black Racism. The limited existing sociocognitive linguistic research indicates that listeners may modulate their linguistic expectations during cognitive processing based on speaker identity and stereotypes of speakers. As linguistic discrimination is ever-present in U.S. society, in addition to describing sociocognitive solutions, this article also represents a call to action for researchers to empirically test ideological claims about linguistic varieties that are passively accepted, strengthen replicability, and broaden approaches to the study of minoritized varieties more generally. Hopefully, this article will inspire linguistics researchers to consider all factors, cognitive and social, related to linguistic perception, further contributing to a greater understanding of how to combat linguistic discrimination from a multidimensional frame.

In the 1984 volume of the Annual review of applied linguistics, Grabe (1985) presented a comprehensive discussion of discourse analysis explaning its history, frameworks, models, taxonomies, and operationalizations. The approach of the present article complements Grabe's as a reivew with a more direct concern for instructional applications of discourse analysis in student reading and writing.

The past decade has witnessed intensive activity in Textlinguistik (discourse analysis) among German linguists (cf., Kallmeyer and Meyer–Herrmann 1980). This, of course, is not an entirely new phenomenon. Such basic works on German syntax as Drach (1940) and Boost (1964) paid attention to relationships between sentences within discourse and/or their impact on word order.

The history of literacy in the Maghreb (Arabic, “west”) spans several millennia. Strategically located in the Northwest of Africa and on the Southern shores of the Mediterranean, the Maghreb has been a crossroads where several civilizations mingled and interacted: The Greeks, the Phonecians, the Romans, the Arabs, and more recently the Turks and the Western Europeans have all affected, to varying degrees, the history, culture, language, and literacy of the region (Al-khatib-Boujibar 1984).

Anyone who undertakes to do an overview of so large an area as studies on “the South Asian bilingual's verbal repertoire and the functional allocation of languages” within so small a space as permitted by this review deserves her predicament. The problem lies in the complexity and diversity of the situation, and the danger of inanity resulting from oversimplification. However, since the alternative is to wait for book-length treatments which have yet to be written, and in the meanwhile, suffer the omission of a prime example of a multilingual region from a volume devoted to multilingualism, I shall compromise by treating only the broadly representative situations and trends and ignoring the (sometimes more interesting) particularities of a given language or an individual contact situation.