The book is an edited collection of 18 chapters written by a total of 21 authors from around the world. Chapter 1, which serves as an introduction, outlines the book's structure and scope. The editors, Ken Hyland and Lillian L. C. Wong, define the book's purpose as ‘to offer readers a range of different ways of thinking about innovation in English language education, and different methods of investigating the impact of innovation’ (p. 2). The remaining 17 chapters, which are divided into four sections, discuss a range of topics including theoretical frameworks for education, teacher training, curriculum development, and teaching practice.

The present volume represents one of the most recent additions to a burgeoning number of publications in the field of L2 motivation (Dörnyei & Ushioda, 2009; Murray, Gao, & Lamb, 2011). As in most of these, ideas of the self-concept and identity in learner motivation are clearly visible. However, a welcome aspect of this book is its focus on the local context of language learning and how this interacts with both the learner's concept of self and the motivation to pursue his or her language studies.

Affix hopping: a new Olympic discipline or innovative brewing technique? Anglo Frisian brightening: a meteorological phenomenon occurring over the North Sea? Cranberry morph: a result of genetically-modified gardening? Well, no, as it turns out. This Dictionary ‘provides concise and clear definitions of all the terms any undergraduate or graduate student is likely to encounter in the study of linguistics and English language or in other degrees involving linguistics, such as modern languages, media studies and translation.’ It has approximately 3000 entries. In some cases, there is more than one definition of a term, e.g. three for ‘declarative’, five for ‘domain’ and three for ‘ergative’ (one of these ‘condemned by some linguists’). Many entries include examples from English and other languages; among the other languages, Russian (transliterated) and Turkish are particularly well represented - some might say over-represented. As well as terminology entries, there are entries for 246 languages, and for key figures in the history of linguistics such as Jespersen, Labov, Sapir etc.

This introductory text successfully achieves its ambitious goal of demonstrating how the Construction Grammar framework can be applied in a systematic fashion to a range of sub-disciplines within Linguistics. Construction Grammar (CG) is a unified theory of knowledge of language modelled on knowledge of constructions. Each chapter illustrates the application of CG to a different sub-discipline, from those that are more well-established in the literature, such as argument structure and information packaging, to areas that have been addressed in depth more recently from this perspective, such as morphology, language variation and language change.

Languages, like their speakers, are socially situated. They exist in specific contexts, which they help shape and which, in turn, are shaped by them. Looking at the ways in which these interactions occur can tell us a lot about language users as well as languages (and language) themselves. Broadly speaking, it is this social aspect of language that is the object of study of sociolinguistics. I may be biased (after all, it was after being exposed to Cheshire's (2009) study of language use by a group of adolescents in Reading, England, that I decided to choose it as a field of study), but it is indeed a fascinating branch of linguistics, for it has the potential to appeal to those with an interest in language – either as an entity per se or as an instrument – but also to those who are more attracted by the sociological implications of it.

Englicious is a new online library of resources for English language teachers that has been designed by the Survey of English Usage at UCL. It offers not only lesson plans and activities for use in the classroom, but a collection of Continuing Professional Development resources for teachers, all aimed at supporting the teaching of the new National Curriculum in England. There is a particular focus on spelling, punctuation and grammar (SPaG), and especially on preparing pupils for the Year 3 and Year 6 SPaG tests, but users will also find materials covering many other aspects of English Language at both a primary and a secondary level.