LE LANGAGE PREFABRIQUE EN FRANÇAIS L2: ETUDE ACQUISITIONNELLE ET COMPARATIVE [PREFABRICATED LANGUAGE IN L2 FRENCH: AN ACQUISITIONAL AND COMPARATIVE STUDY].Fanny Forsberg. Stockholm: Stockholm University, Faculty of Humanities, Department of French, Italian and Classical Languages, 2006. Pp. iv + 183 + CD-ROM. Available for free download at http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:su:diva-1347.

In this dissertation, Forsberg describes the acquisition of formulaic sequences (séquences préfabriquées or “prefabs”) among Swedish learners of French ranging from beginners to near-native speakers. After a detailed discussion of existing models, Forsberg gives her own definition of prefabs, one that is contextually based and accommodates second language (L2) learners. She adopts and extends Erman and Warren's (2000) model for her own study using six categories: lexical (coup de foudre “love at first sight,” c'est la vie “that's life”), grammatical (être en train de “to be in the process of”), discursive (textual: c'est “it is,” il y a “there is”; own speech management: je pense “I think”; and interactive: bien sûr “of course”), interlanguage or “idiosyncratic” (ils n'ont pas la morale “they aren't in good spirits”), and situational (je m'appelle “my name is”). Interview materials from the Stockholm-based French learner corpus InterFra as well as materials collected by the author for very advanced and native-speaker groups are used for the study. There are four groups: (a) six high school students; (b) six university-level beginners; (c) six very advanced learners, most of whom have spent several years in Paris; and (d) six native speakers.

TEACHER COLLABORATION AND TALK IN MULTILINGUAL CLASSROOMS.Angela Creese. Clevedon, UK: Multilingual Matters, 2006. Pp. ix + 217. $119.95 cloth, $49.95 paper.

The roles of teachers and their collaboration in multilingual classes in three secondary schools in the United Kingdom are explored in this volume. It is an ethnographic study conducted inside the schools, based on observation and interviews. Creese provides a critical analysis of the relationship between language teachers and subject teachers. The insights of this work can be useful for many other multilingual schools in other contexts in which teachers work together in the same classroom and for schools with native language assistants or teachers for students with special needs who work in collaboration with subject teachers.

GOALS FOR ACADEMIC WRITING: ESL STUDENTS AND THEIR INSTRUCTORS.Alister Cumming (Ed.). Amsterdam: Benjamins, 2006. Pp. xii + 204. $42.95 paper.

In universities throughout the world, faculty engage in discussions related to the writing performance of their students—with many concerned about challenges second language (L2) students face in achieving competence in academic writing tasks. Yet, most studies in the field of L2 writing focus on a single area of concern within the learning and teaching spectrum; the collective results of these explorations must often be pieced together by an individual who reviews a large number of separate studies. Cumming's edited volume stems from a more ambitious and data-rich approach; its chapters derive from a 2-year project in which the contributors investigated and compared the learning and teaching goals of several dozen L2 writers and a number of their teachers as the students moved from an intensive English as a second language (ESL) program in Canada to their first year at several Canadian universities.

MIND AND CONTEXT IN SECOND LANGUAGE ACQUISITION.Cristina Sanz (Ed.). Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2005. Pp. xii + 302. $49.95 paper.

This edited collection emanates from a course taught by the editor, Sanz, at Georgetown University. Its chapters are derived from guest lectures given by her colleagues at Georgetown as well as one by VanPatten. The uniting theme of the volume, therefore, seems to be the Georgetown faculty's interests, rather than a specific intellectual focus or theoretical orientation that, broadly speaking, takes a cognitive perspective on second language (L2) learning. Nevertheless, the volume packs in an impressive and wide-ranging amount of information, and most of the chapters stand on their own as extremely valuable tutorials on the topics that they cover—although it is not clear that the intended audience for each of the chapters is the same. One of the most useful features of this volume is the excellent guided critiques at the end of each chapter, which lead those new to the research area through a sample study.

Publications received.

DEVELOPING LITERACY IN SECOND-LANGUAGE LEARNERS: REPORT OF THE NATIONAL LITERACY PANEL ON LANGUAGE-MINORITY CHILDREN AND YOUTH.Diane August and Timothy Shanahan (Eds.). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum, 2006. Pp. vii + 669. $65.00 paper.

This is the outcome of work by the National Literacy Panel on Language-Minority Children and Youth. The panel included experts from the United States and Canada selected by the Institute of Education Sciences. The topics addressed include second language (L2) development, cognitive development, curriculum and instruction, assessment, and methodology. Concerned with how best to improve literacy achievement for language-minority students, the collection is a synthesis of more than 200 systematically selected research reports on the development of literacy for language-minority students. The panel (with August as principal investigator and Shanahan as Chair) undertook a comprehensive review of studies on language-minority students based mainly in the United States but also incorporated studies from the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, the Netherlands, Finland, and Israel.

UNITY AND DIVERSITY IN LANGUAGE USE.Kristyan Spelman Miller and Paul Thompson (Eds.). New York: Continuum, 2002. Pp. 224. $60.00 paper.

This collection of 13 papers from the annual meeting of the British Association of Applied Linguistics held in 2001 covers a broad range of topics, including doctor-patient communications, students' interpretations of teachers' gestures, and measuring the lexical complexity of texts. A theme that runs throughout the collection and foreshadows an area of much current interest is the notion of voice and identity.

EARLY TRILINGUALISM: A FOCUS ON QUESTIONS.Julia D. Barnes. Clevedon, UK: Multilingual Matters, 2006. Pp. vii + 256. $84.95 cloth.

Do children who acquire three languages from an early age acquire them as if they were learning each language separately or as one linguistic system? How does the acquisition process evolve when considering three languages as different as English, Spanish, and Basque? These are two of the questions raised by the volume under review.

THE LANGUAGE OF LANGUAGE: CORE CONCEPTS IN LINGUISTIC ANALYSIS (2nd ed.). Madalena Cruz-Ferreira and Sunita Anne Abraham. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2006. Pp. iii + 266. $32.00 paper.

This 12-chapter volume is designed to introduce a student with no previous experience to the field of linguistics. The chapters are arranged to focus on the various facets of language, with each chapter building on the preceding one. Chapter 1, “Language and Linguistics,” and chapter 2, “Language and Languages,” offer an introduction to language as a concept. Chapters 3 and 4 have a word-level focus, whereas chapters 5 and 6 focus on sounds. Chapters 7 and 8 synthesize the previous chapters to discuss language on the sentence level. Chapters 10–12 use the discussion of language structure presented in the previous chapters to direct the reader's attention to the meaning of language as a whole. These last four chapters discuss language meaning, discourse, and the relationship between language and humans.