This multifaceted mosaic of vocabulary acquisition should be in every language professional's library, nudging us to look beyond size of vocabulary and toward a better understanding of what Meara (1996) has called its cognitive “organisation.”

I am writing this review approximately three months before voters go to the polls in California to decide the fate of Proposition 227, the English for Children Initiative (otherwise known as the Unz Initiative). Whatever the outcome, the fate of bilingual education in California (and, as a consequence, across the United States) will be profoundly affected. Mr. Unz, who opposes bilingual education, is described in a page one article in the New York Times (March 10, 1988) as a person who has no “background in education,” “has never set foot in a bilingual education class,” and “puts no credence in any of the research on either side of the (bilingual) debate.” Brisk, the author of the book under review here, is a proponent of quality bilingual education and draws upon her personal experiences as an educator as well as an enormous body of research and literature to help define the characteristics of effective bilingual programs. She forcefully argues that: “Our society seems to be unable to differentiate between choice of a national language and choice of a language for education,” (p. 31) and she challenges bilingual education's opponents, who she says “in effect would postpone quality education until students master English” (p. 2).

In the book Computer-assisted language learning: Context and conceptualization, Levy sets out in the preface to (a) “circumscribe Computer-Assisted Language Learning [CALL] for the purpose of teaching it” (p. xi), (b) build on previous work rather than being led by technological innovation, and (c) “understand better the relationship between theory and application” (p. xi). Two hundred thirty-two pages later (plus 66 pages of appendices and references), it is clear that the book delivers its promise. The author bases the book on previous work and addresses a perpetual problem in CALL—reinventing the wheel. Moreover, Levy links the history of CALL with the present and combines a very thorough literature review with survey data about CALL materials development.

This paper is in answer to Ellis's (1994) call for more research about vocabulary acquisition from oral input in four areas. It is a hypothesis-generating study of nine advanced university EFL learners' incidental vocabulary acquisition from oral and written dialogue journals over a semester's time. All teacher and student entries in the two types of journals were transcribed and analyzed using WordCruncher (1993). The analyses compare the characteristics of the input to the learners in the two modes as well as quantitative and qualitative evidence of vocabulary acquisition by the learners from the two modes. Findings of this study indicate several specific places (14 statements) where further research could be undertaken. These fit in three of the areas Ellis named for exploration: (a) “the nature of the input,” (b) “the role of interaction,” and (c) “individual learner factors” (p. 1). The findings suggest measures that can be used for quantitative and qualitative evidence of vocabulary acquisition from natural sources

This published version of Markham's dissertation surveys the literature on second language phonetics (but not phonology), proposes two models, and presents experiments involving imitation of languages and dialects.

This book, which is one of a series of papers from the University of Duisburg, is a justification of the visual elements of a particular computer-assisted language learning program for learning Dutch called EuroLex. About one third of the book is a description of the EuroLex program. Because of this, it suffers from the seemingly unavoidable problem that many accounts of CALL programs face, and that is the need for elaborate step-by-step description of the operation of the program when five minutes working with the actual program would convey more information more effectively.

These two volumes contain a selection of 19 papers presented at the Penn State Conference on the Acquisition of Spanish as a First or Second language held in October 1995.

This article reports an experimental study of the differential effects of premodified input, interactionally modified input, and modified output on the comprehension of directions in a listen-and-do task and the acquisition of new words embedded in the directions. The modified output group achieved higher comprehension and vocabulary acquisition scores than either of the input groups. There was no difference between the premodified and interactionally modified input groups. The advantage of the modified output group is explained in terms of the qualitatively superior dialogic interaction that occurred in this condition rather than in terms of actual language production.

A fattish edited volume on SLA based on a Dutch summer course held in 1991, the book is divided into eight chapters, each containing between one and three contributions by experts in various specialized areas. These chapters are headed as follows:

Progress toward establishing a model of lexical development to guide vocabulary acquisition research requires more precise specification of the various dimensions of lexical competence, the interrelationships among them, and how they interface with processes of word learning and use. Three dimensions of lexical competence are proposed: (a) partial to precise knowledge, (b) depth of knowledge, and (c) receptive to productive use ability. The relationship between the two knowledge dimensions and the acquisition of word meaning is considered, with emphasis on the complexity of the semantization1 process and on the need for redefining lexical development as both item-learning and system-changing. The adequacy of the three-dimensional description as a reflection of the process of vocabulary development is then discussed. Consideration of the nature of the developmental interrelationships among the dimensions raises two further questions: (a) Is depth of knowledge a prerequisite for developing precise comprehension? and (b) Are precise knowledge and depth of knowledge prerequisites for a word to become productive?

From reader to reading teacher: Issues and strategies for second language classrooms is a book targeted at second language teachers in training. The first two chapters provide a brief overview of theory and research in second language reading. Chapter 3 treats course design; 4, prereading activities; 5, activities during reading; 6, postreading activities; 7, vocabulary; 8, the use of literature; 9, assessment; 10, lesson planning; and 11, teacher development. In other words, the book attempts a comprehensive treatment of important issues related to reading instruction in second language contexts.

The last thirty years have witnessed considerable research in the fields of second language acquisition (SLA) and second language teaching (SLT). However, most of this research has been concerned with second languages such as English, Spanish, French, and German. There has been comparatively little research on the less commonly taught second languages such as Hindi and other South Asian languages. As the editor states in the preface, enrollment in courses on South Asian languages has rapidly grown in universities in the United States and there is an urgent need for a careful examination of the issues relevant to the teaching and learning of these languages. The purpose of the book is to fill the existing gap and to generate an interest among both researchers and practitioners in the teaching and learning of South Asian languages.

Second language speech: Structure and process is a collection of current research on SLA phonology. The papers in this book vary widely in scope and theoretical stance, but a recurrent theme is that research in second language phonology can shed light on other areas of SLA research. Summarized here are those papers that represent mainstream SLA phonology research, as well as papers that have particular relevance to other areas of SLA research.

Communication Strategies: Psycholinguistic and Sociolinguistic Perspectives is not simply an update of the 1983 Strategies in Interlanguage Communication (Færch & Kasper). This volume goes beyond the earlier concerns of definition, identification, and classification of communication strategies to considerations of different theoretical and analytical perspectives, research methodologies, and the role of cultural and linguistic backgrounds.

This book is a first attempt to bring together a collection of state-of-the-art studies of various lines of research on language processing in Spanish, ranging from speech perception to sentence production.

This paper takes the papers in this special collection as a starting point and raises issues concerning key terms, with particular emphasis on incidental. It is argued that there is no clear way to show that a word has been learned incidentally, if one means that specific attention is not drawn to that word either by some external force or by the learner. I further argue that, to understand vocabulary learning, linguists cannot limit the investigation to word meaning. Essential to a study of the lexicon is the study of syntax—in particular, the incorporation of syntactic subcategorizations. Taking all of these factors into account, a more nuanced approach to the study of incidental vocabulary learning is needed.

In this dissertation based on empirical studies conducted by the author and reprinted as a series of articles in the text, Kuure studies the development of different types of bilingualism. The primary purpose of the studies is to determine the significance of age in the acquisition of a second language. Evidence is also provided for describing the acquisition and use of languages in various multicultural and multilingual settings. Data for the studies were obtained from Finnish-Swedish bilingual students between the ages of 13 and 15 for whom Swedish was the second language.

This volume, the third in the Studies in Bilingualism series from the European Science Foundation's research on adult immigrants' L2 acquisition, begins with the observation that we have widely accepted the idea that learners' varieties and the transitions from one variety to the next are systematic, yet we have little research that records this systematicity. This study does exactly that by following for 30 months 10 L2 learners' developing linguistic means for indicating spatial relations. Carroll reports on two Italian speakers acquiring English; Becker on four Italian speakers and a Turkish speaker acquiring German; and Giacobbe, Perdue, and Porquier on two Spanish speakers and a Moroccan Arabic speaker acquiring French. To elicit the core data, the researchers asked the learners to describe pictures and to provide stage directions for a scene they had viewed to someone who had not seen it.

In this revised dissertation, Robinson tackles two important topics in adult second language learning: (a) the roles of attention and awareness and (b) the mechanisms for storage of second language knowledge.

This book contains 11 papers on the computational extraction of lexical structure from text input and text search: That is what is meant here by lexical acquisition. The introduction sets out the prospects for automatic lexical acquisition and is followed by three papers on proper name identification and categorization. These offer different computational solutions to the quandaries proper names pose for delimitation, classification, standardization, and discourse reference. For example, where is the person in Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan and how should this to be linked to Fed Chief? The advance in these papers is their attempt to solve proper naming via text structure alone, which makes the systems more savvy than brute look-up programs.