It has been more than a decade since the publication of Paul Nation's Teaching and learning vocabulary (1990), which brought together the findings in lexical acquisition and teaching at the time and has been an invaluable reference and guide to many in the field. However, after years of neglect, vocabulary acquisition has finally come into its own with an explosion of attention and new research, creating a need for an update. Just in time comes Norbert Schmitt's Vocabulary in language teaching (VLT) in the Cambridge Language Education Series.

Loritz discusses the nature and evolution of language in the context of a connectionist approach to neural architecture, namely, Adaptive Resonance Theory (ART). Given the massive parallel processing inherent to ART, he argues that all of the mechanisms inherent to generative grammar, including discrete rules, stored grammatical representations, and so on, can be dispensed with. Loritz's “adaptive grammar” attempts to derive what have been considered to be grammatical universals from the structure of the human brain, in particular its short-term memory limitations. For example, so-called universal topic-verb order (p. 149) follows from “a deeper biological injunction to say (and do) topical things first, a ‘rule' which applies not just to conversations but to everything brains do. It is a corollary of evolution: the organism that doesn't do relevant things first simply doesn't survive” (pp. 150–151).

As a syntactician whose students include TESOL students, I found that many of the questions that Newmeyer addresses in Language form and language function (LFLF) are almost identical to those I am often asked when teaching syntax to those whose goals differ from mine. For this reason alone, LFLF is an important book for anyone interested in the foundations of the linguistic framework they may subscribe to, whether functionalist or formalist.

One of the growing challenges facing foreign language educators in many societies is that created by the presence of “native speakers” in second language classrooms. Especially in countries with significant immigration patterns, such as Canada, the United States, and Australia, there are growing numbers of students enrolled in courses in languages other than English (LOTEs) with which they have some background familiarity or knowledge. All too often, these students have been seen as something of a problem in the foreign language classroom, especially in K–12 settings. Background speakers constitutes an important and valuable first step in changing such perceptions.

Stimulated recall is an introspective data-collection procedure in which some “tangible . . . reminder of an event [stimulates] recall of the mental processes in operation during the event itself” (p. 17). The reminders may consist of audio or video recordings, transcriptions, an observer's fieldnotes about the event, and so on.

Over the past 15 years, a number of acquisition studies have found that young children allow pronouns to take an antecedent within their clause, in violation of Principle B of the binding theory. Thus, unlike adults, they allow him to refer to Nathan in the sentence Nathan praised him. Thornton and Wexler present results of a new experiment testing knowledge of binding within VP ellipsis structures of the form Nathan praised him, and Albert did too. Whereas adults do not allow the pronouns in each conjunct to have different antecedents, some children do. Based on their findings, Thornton and Wexler propose that children's syntactic knowledge is intact (and hence Principle B is being observed) but their pragmatic knowledge is incomplete.

The author reviews the theoretical and empirical literature on L1 and L2 acquisition in light of the latest version of generative grammar, and uses the results of these studies to formulate an approach to the acquisition of L2 grammatical competence. A certain background in generative grammar is necessary to follow her exposition.

This volume extends the traditional focus of this series on the phonology-phonetics interface with papers exploring the contribution of various types of empirical data—including acoustic, articulatory, and perceptual—to the principal themes embodied in the questions of what constitutes a possible word and what underlies the human capability to produce language.

In this latest volume of the Sociolinguistics in Deaf Communities Series, Winston has included not only discourse analysis of American Sign Language (ASL) but also of sign languages native to Bali, Italy, and England. She offers a fascinating look at the “intricate discourse patterns that have evolved in different languages” (p. ix). Her work should be required reading for all teachers of sign language as well as teachers of interpreters. This book will also appeal to sociolinguists; language use in the community is clearly the overriding theme.

The authors begin this introductory text by posing four major questions for the study of language: what is the nature of language, how do we acquire it, how do we use it in speech production and comprehension, and how is it represented in the brain? These questions also define the orientation of the book, which aims to introduce the reader to the study of linguistics through four interrelated subfields: linguistics proper, developmental linguistics, psycholinguistics, and neurolinguistics. Conspicuously absent from the list, of course, is a fifth fundamental question about language: what is the relationship between language use and social structure? Sociolinguistics is only briefly defined and introduced, and discussion of sociolinguistics throughout the text is limited to the relationship between social structure and language variation and change.

Researchers interested in second language attrition have studied a wide variety of bilingual speakers, ranging from foreign language students who learned a language through classroom study to those who have developed high proficiency during life abroad. What these studies have in common is their investigation of questions related to bilingual speakers' loss of L2 knowledge or proficiency. Hansen's collection of papers presents research on a range of bilingual speakers who have the Japanese language in common, whether that language is their L1 or L2. The book is divided into two major sections. The first section, consisting of three papers, presents studies of Japanese children of elementary school age who learned English while living abroad but who have returned to Japan. This section will be of interest to EFL teachers of children as well as to L2 researchers. The four papers in the second section of the book examine the attrition of Japanese by adults. Most of these adults became subjects while residing in the United States after working or studying in Japan. The adults studied in these chapters had a variety of different combinations of exposure and formal study and also a broad range of years away from Japan, from 9 months to 30+ years. Additionally, the subjects of one study never lived in Japan at all but learned Japanese during Japan's occupation of Micronesia.

Pragmatic meaning and cognition provides an analysis of pragmatic meaning that is grounded in general cognitive linguistics. It makes use of the specific framework of “experiential realism” as put forth in the works of George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, which views language as a representation of reality as it is perceived and experienced by human beings. As such, experiential realism stands in contradistinction to an objectivist framework in which language is a symbolic representation of objectively existing reality. Marmaridou's overarching goal is to demonstrate how sociocultural aspects of pragmatic meaning are integrated into cognitive structure rather than being external to it.

Neuro-neophytes need not be deterred by “ . . . in the somatosensory cortex of rats, the critical period for the reorganization of the barrel cells in response to haptic stimulation from the vibrissae is essentially coterminous with the period when LTP can be induced in those cells” (p. 70). The content of this volume more than compensates for any difficult passages, raising enough issues to generate discussion as well as fuel further research by those who know their ERPs from their ECPs.

Jansen and Liddicoat's volume on teachers as researchers in the FL/SL classroom is an invaluable contribution to the complex and complicated issue of assessing formal language learning environments (i.e., classrooms). The purpose is to provide “an overview of the philosophy which underlies the inclusion of research as a central part of an in-service professional development program” (p. 1) as well as to “give examples of the scope and potential for research conducted by teachers” (ibid.).

The papers in this book were presented at the Symposium on Grammaticalization held in Leiden 1995, with the exception of the paper by Tabor and Traugott. This collection of 11 papers deals with a variety of cases of language change that do not fit perfectly into the models of grammaticalization as a unidirectional process by which open-class elements are weakened and become part of the closed-class set. Briefly described case studies in a variety of languages—from Romance, Germanic, and South East Asian languages to Ancient Greek, Hittite, Basque, and others—allow the reader to peer through the overwhelming number of factors and interactions among factors involved in language change. At the same time, one can also examine the struggle to define and determine which facts do and do not belong to the realm of grammaticalization. To illustrate some of the issues addressed in this book, I will briefly describe some of the papers.

This volume is an extremely comprehensive research report. It speaks principally to language planning, language policy bodies, and curriculum development units in Ireland, as well as to teachers of Irish in primary schools. Although it targets a quite specific audience, it has many elements of interest to policymakers internationally, especially in relation to minority languages, and to researchers in SLA interested in areas such as bilingualism, immersion, the role of instruction, and input in the classroom.

This enjoyable, informative book would serve as an excellent introductory text in a beginning course on language acquisition or linguistics. The content is somewhat narrower than the title suggests: The book deals exclusively with L1 acquisition, and its focus is Chomskyan syntax and Universal Grammar, with a bit of semantics presented toward the end (i.e., phonology is not addressed). Most of the data is from English, though other languages are explored (e.g., French, Japanese), with three very interesting chapters on American Sign Language.

This annotated bibliography is a list of 676 journal articles, book chapters, dissertations, and ERIC documents related to the teaching and learning of second and foreign language writing. The list is a compilation of bibliographies published in the Journal of Second Language Writing during the years 1993–1997, with entries dating from 1991 to 1997. After a brief introduction, which includes the databases that were searched and the periodicals that were examined, the bibliography presents the entries in alphabetical order by author. Following an author index is a 23-page subject index to the entries.

This book, said to be written for native speakers of English as well as second and foreign language learners, is about the differences between the pronunciation of words in careful and casual speech, despite identity of spelling. It presents as models written-language texts and their phonetically written equivalents in the prestige British Received Pronunciation (RP) variety, and then provides more texts as exercise to be transcribed both ways. Almost all of the exercises are anonymously authored texts of 40 or more lines, on a variety of topics. Answers are given in an appendix. The idea is that learning to write English phonetically will improve nonnative speakers' pronunciation and, one supposes, promote the more accepting attitude of native speakers toward casual speech reductions.

Recently, classroom-based foreign language learning, particularly as practiced in Europe, has begun moving from a focus on teaching for communicative competence to teaching for intercultural communicative competence. Like communicative competence, intercultural communicative competence includes the knowledge and abilities needed to participate in communicative activities in which the target language is the primary communicative code and in situations where it is the common code for those with different preferred languages. It also includes cognitive and affective skills and behaviors needed to engage in unfamiliar encounters with culturally different interlocutors, to negotiate one's cultural identities in light of one's roles in these encounters, and to understand the norms and assumptions underlying the various communicative activities on one's own terms.