This book addresses the challenges facing modern language education at the start of the new millennium. Although its focus is the United Kingdom, the concerns delineated resonate on this side of the Atlantic.

The topic of this book, part of a new series published by Benjamins entitled Pragmatics and beyond, is negotiated interaction. It begins with a lengthy introduction to the subject matter, and then presents an empirical study of negotiated interaction in English as a foreign language classrooms in Morocco. The first two chapters (a third of the text) seek to operationalize interaction and define the role of negotiated interaction in second language acquisition (SLA). These chapters are useful in the sense that they provide a fairly comprehensive review of the literature prior to 1991. However, the field has come a long way since that time, and a decade of crucial work is missing from this 1999 book.

This study investigates the acquisition of the unaccusative-unergative distinction in L2 Japanese by English learners. The aim is to establish whether learners of Japanese are sensitive to the lexical-semantic characteristics of verbs in similar ways as learners of Romance languages who were found to follow the Split Intransitivity Hierarchy (Sorace, 1993a, 1995a). Two groups of learners participated in the study, one consisting of learners who had not had any previous exposure to Japanese outside the classroom, and the other consisting of learners at the end of a 9-month period of continuous stay in Japan. A control group of native Japanese speakers also took part in the experiment. Subjects were tested on their knowledge of the different behavior of unaccusative and unergative verbs with respect to quantifier floating (Miyagawa, 1989); the native group was also tested on Case drop (Kageyama, 1993). The results show that both the native and the nonnative speakers are conditioned by the Split Intransitivity Hierarchy in their judgments on unergative verbs; however, their judgments on unaccusative verbs do not pattern according to the predictions. It is argued that this difference stems from the ambiguity of the Japanese input on unaccusative verbs, which are characterized by syntactic optionality.

This volume offers the reader a potpourri of papers relating to many different aspects of the teaching of French as a Second Language (FSL) in English Canada. The collection emerged from a course taught by Sharon Lapkin at the Ontario Institute of Studies in Education and makes accessible empirical studies that had previously existed only as unpublished manuscripts or research reports.

The relationship between brain structure and language has been of interest since the nineteenth century, as is evidenced by phrenology studies. In modern times, neurolinguistics has tried to investigate this relationship more objectively and scientifically. In their book Language and the brain, Obler and Gjerlow define neurolinguistics as “the study of how the brain (neuro) permits us to have language (linguistics)” (p. 1). As the definition indicates, the book addresses neurolinguistics in a simple, nontechnical manner. Except for chapter 2, “The Brain,” the book presents a readable yet comprehensive account of the important issues in neurolinguistics.

Content-based college ESL instruction offers new insights in the implementation of content-based instruction (CBI). Divided into three parts, the collection opens with an overview of CBI theory and pedagogy and ends with the role of technology. In between are chapters on qualitative studies of novice teachers attempting to implement CBI in their classrooms and various disciplinary approaches to CBI. This new collection is a valuable addition to the CBI literature.

Despite the energetically enthusiastic assertions of the publisher and of Piatelli-Palmirini, who offers an extensive foreword beginning “This dialogue is a gem,” I found that this enormous book did not live up to its hype. I was hoping to find an engaging discussion—in a format I liked from the earlier Lasnik and Uriagareka A course in GB syntax (1988)—that would bring me up to date on the Minimalist Program, from a position somewhere mid-GB. However, I rarely felt the dialogue was intended to welcome the uninitiated. First, its style is irritating, with attempts to be cute that just end up being distracting. Second, many parts of the discussion seem much more aimed at colleagues and rivals on the inside than those members of the larger community for whom the book is designed (as suggested, at least, by the blurb). This is particularly a shame, given that Piatelli-Palmirini's preface explicitly says, patronizingly, that the book will be good for those applied linguists who get irritated with constant change in linguistic theory (p. xxxiv).

The distinction of two types of intransitive verbs—unergatives (with underlying subjects) and unaccusatives (with underlying objects)—may not exist at early stages of L2 acquisition, both being syntactically represented as unergatives. This idea, referred to here as the Unaccusative Trap Hypothesis, provides an elegant developmental account for a variety of seemingly unrelated syntactic phenomena in L2 English, Japanese, and Chinese. Target language input, structural constraints on natural language linking rules, and linguistic properties of a learner's L1s shape stages in the reorganization of the lexical and syntactic components of interlanguage grammars. Although nonnative grammars may initially override the structural constraints postulated as the Unaccusative Hypothesis (Burzio, 1986; Perlmutter, 1978) and the Uniformity of Theta Assignment Hypothesis (Baker, 1988), at later developmental stages some may still achieve conformity with the norms of natural languages.

The past decade has seen an increasing interest within the second language (L2) field in drawing on psycholinguistic, neurolinguistic-neurobiological, and cognitive psychological theories when explaining various aspects of L2 acquisition and use (e.g., Schmidt, 1995; Schuman, 1997; Skehan, 1998). Although Sydney Lamb's account of the neurocognitive basis of language does not focus specifically on second languages, its general analysis of how the brain's linguistic system operates and develops provides highly relevant background knowledge to these recent L2 research directions.

This volume is a collection of papers, the majority of which were first presented on a colloquium at the American Association for Applied Linguistics Conference in 1997. The volume is dedicated to Charlene Junko (Charlie) Sato, who died in 1996 at the age of 44. Charlie was a political activist in several domains but was perhaps best known in applied linguistics circles for her work in support of Hawai'i Creole English (HCE) in communities and schools.

In this article I discuss some key points that are raised in the papers in this special issue. The first issue is that a variety of theoretical tools are necessary for a complete understanding of the issues raised in these papers. Second, although the methodology that is used in studies of second language knowledge has improved, it is clear we still lack an agreed-on set of protocols that will permit reliable comparisons across studies. In spite of these challenges, we are making progress in using complementary theories of the role of lexical representation, predication, and crosslinguistic variation to get a full picture of this complex area of lexico-morphosyntactic knowledge.

This book is an excellent introduction to the field of child language development. It demonstrates the need for both a theory of language development and reliable speech and comprehension data in child language research. As Foster-Cohen states in the preface to the book, the adoption of only a single approach, as opposed to a combination of different approaches, is unlikely to lead to a productive understanding of child language acquisition. The book successfully adopts the perspectives of both the empiricist and the rationalist traditions in its treatment of key issues.

This volume is an excellent introduction to the principles and workings of optimality theory, a relatively new constraint-based framework. The focus is on phonology, which is where the theory thus far has had its greatest impact. A basic understanding of phonology and earlier rule-based derivational theories is assumed. At appropriate points, Kager distinguishes the different claims made by optimality theory and derivational theories. The exercises and suggested readings at the end of each chapter make the book highly suitable as a textbook. The conclusion of each chapter also provides a good summary of the main points. In addition to conventional subject and language indexes, a helpful index of constraints is included with page numbers for where the constraint is defined and used.

This volume presents comprehensive research on English refusals, focusing primarily on L2 use and secondarily on second language acquisition. Twenty-four dyads were video-taped performing open role plays in response to eight situations (two suggestions, two offers, two invitations, and two requests) designed to elicit a refusal. Each dyad consisted of an English NS and NNS, the latter being native speakers of Japanese with low to intermediate English proficiency.

The data that provide the foundation for this investigation of second language (L2) slips of the tongue stem from a corpus originally compiled in 1984 to investigate the use of compensatory strategies by Dutch learners of English. Poulisse defines a slip or speech error as a performance error stemming from a temporary processing problem rather than a competence error reflecting an incomplete or incorrect L2 system. The book's focus is the extent to which research on L2 slips (morphological, phonological, and syntactic) can shed light on speech-production processing for the development of bilingual models of speech production.

Partington has produced an attractive and useful introduction to the field of applied corpus linguistics, a field that has been around for 40 years (since the Brown corpus) but is only now coming into its own in the United States. The volume is attractive for three main reasons: it is clearly and pleasantly written, it quotes extensively and appropriately from the earlier general and applied linguistics literature, and it contains an impressive range of examples consisting of concordance lines followed by commentary and analysis.

Second language development in writing: Measures of fluency, accuracy, and complexity is a technical report that reviews 39 studies examining measures of writing development. It is a comprehensive, lucid, and carefully researched piece of work analyzing an untidy body of literature. This volume is essential reading for anyone doing quantitative research in L2 writing. The studies included in this review are those that have attempted to correlate potential linguistic measures of writing development with writing proficiency, not simply studies that have used the various measures as dependent variables to examine the effects of some instructional treatment. Complicating the picture is the fact that indicators of writing proficiency are varied, as is the case with indicators of oral proficiency (Thomas, 1994). Each of these indicators, including standardized tests, levels in various language programs, and holistic measures, has its own set of problems. For example, of the 16 studies using holistic scales, only half reported interrater or intrarater reliability.

This volume, part of a series on research methodologies in second language acquisition (SLA), describes contributions that conversation analysis (CA) makes to the field. Markee argues that CA, which provides microanalyses of moment-by-moment “talk-in-interaction” (Schegloff, 1987), makes visible learners' efforts to speak and understand a new language. He questions the tendency in SLA toward theory-driven and largely experimental research at the expense of theory-building and naturalistic methods.

This book would be a good introduction for teachers who are novices in including the Internet in their language courses. Rather than lengthy explanations of the technical aspects of the Internet, the bulk of this book is devoted to sample classroom activities.

David Andrews's examination of the Russian language's evolution in post–Cold War North America is based on two intriguing premises that will surely be of interest to cultural historians, general linguists, specialists in bilingualism, as well as, more obviously, Slavic linguists.