THE ‘LANGUAGE INSTINCT’ DEBATE: REVISED EDITION. Geoffrey Sampson. New York: Continuum, 2005. Pp. xiii + 224. $130 cloth, $39.95 paper.

This volume, a revised version of Sampson's (1997) Educating Eve, is an empiricist response to linguistic nativism. Accordingly, the volumes's primary objective is to challenge the view that there is an innate component specifically responsible for the human linguistic capacity. This new edition presents insights from corpus linguistics, which are used to refute the original poverty-of-the-stimulus arguments. The introductory chapter gives a historical overview of the nativist doctrine by distinguishing between the original writings of Chomsky and present-day nativists such as Bickerton and Pinker. In this chapter, Sampson also introduces his view of language acquisition as a hypothesis-testing interplay between the learner and the environment, ideas that he attributes to Popper.

THE STRUGGLE TO TEACH ENGLISH AS AN INTERNATIONAL LANGUAGE.Adrian Holliday. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. Pp. ix + 193. $25.95 paper.

Curriculum settings, the relationship among language, culture, and discourse, and the change in the ownership of English are the main topics addressed in this volume. Holliday discusses social and political issues in English language education in diverse international locations. He focuses on the injustices created by the desire to change the cultures of nonnative-speaker students and teachers and proposes suggestions on how to overcome this situation. Working with English as an international language brings up some conflicts among TESOL educators and researchers, who face cultural and political interfaces created by the native-speakerist attitude. The balance of power in the classroom is central to Holliday's proposal of cultural continuity and enriching encounters.

BILINGUAL MINDS: EMOTIONAL EXPERIENCE, EXPRESSION AND REPRESENTATION.Aneta Pavlenko (Ed.). Clevedon, UK: Multilingual Matters, 2006. Pp. xvi + 324. $54.95 paper.

Pioneering research by Pavlenko (2002) has attracted the attention of many researchers to the emotions of bilinguals and multilinguals. The present collection of chapters reports a number of recent studies in this new research area. The 11 contributions, written by established academics, cover various issues in emotional experience, emotional expression, and emotional representation of bilingual and multilingual speakers.

The articles in this special issue present very interesting data on the acquisition of relative clauses (RCs) in Japanese, Korean, and Cantonese. The errors and developmental patterns are partially different from those that have been observed in European languages, and they appear to go against predictions made by the Keenan and Comrie (1977) noun phrase accessibility hierarchy (NPAH).

TEACHING ENGLISH TO THE WORLD: HISTORY, CURRICULUM AND PRACTICE.George Braine (Ed.). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum, 2005. Pp. xx + 169. $22.50 paper.

This volume, edited by Braine, has some links to a volume he edited 6 years earlier (Braine, 1999). The major purpose of the earlier work was to provide personal narratives of a number of nonnative English language teachers from various world settings. This volume relies on nonnative teachers to present information on the history of English language teaching and the most prominent curricula for this teaching in their respective countries, followed by their autobiographies. The issue of nonnative teachers of English has gained increasing prominence in recent years, as witnessed by the growing number of conference colloquia, formation of new interest sections within professional associations, and publications devoted to this topic. This volume contributes to that topic and movement but goes even further by adding information on what English language teaching has meant in key countries around the world.

THE DYNAMICS OF LANGUAGE USE: FUNCTIONAL AND CONTRASTIVE PERSPECTIVES.Christopher S. Butler, Maria de los Angeles Gómez-González, and Susana M. Doval-Suárez (Eds.). Amsterdam: Benjamins, 2005. Pp. xvi + 413. $150.00 cloth.

Judging from the varied and stimulating content of this anthology, the Third International Contrastive Linguistics Conference (held in September 2003 at the University of Santiago de Compostela, Spain) must have been an exciting experience for theorists and teachers in the field of SLA. This volume—a collection of selected papers from the conference—pays eloquent testimony to the success of the academic gathering.

The use of the noun phrase accessibility hierarchy (NPAH) as an explanation for the use, interpretation, or both of relative clauses (RCs) by second language (L2) speakers is one of the earliest examples of an attempt to offer a principled hypothesis about L2 development. Its explicit claims have allowed empirical testing that has produced important counterexamples, including the results of the studies reported in this special issue, which suggest that the hierarchy is not applicable to the SLA of languages like Cantonese, Japanese, and Korean. A weak version of the hypothesis that applies only to languages in which RCs express head-complement dependencies (i.e., postnominal relatives) is just as problematic. I suggest here that the time has come to consign this hierarchy to the history of SLA research and focus on other kinds of question about L2 speakers' knowledge of RCs.

COLLOCATIONS IN A LEARNER CORPUS. Nadia Nesselhauf. Amsterdam: Benjamins, 2004. Pp. xii + 331. $126.00 cloth.

Based on the author's dissertation, this volume provides a close look at the verb-noun collocations used by native German speakers writing argumentative or descriptive essays in English. A subset of 318 essays from the international corpus of learner English (ICLE) provides the 154,191-word corpus used in this study.

LANGUAGE LEARNERS IN STUDY ABROAD CONTEXTS.Margaret A. DuFon and Eton Churchill (Eds.). Clevedon, UK: Multilingual Matters, 2006. Pp. xiii + 329. $43.96 paper.

The goal of this volume is to assess research since Freed (1995) on the effectiveness of study abroad programs on second language learning. An introductory chapter by the editors gives an overview of study abroad research since 1995. This is followed by 10 chapters divided among four sections that focus on pragmatic development, dinner table interaction, a section titled “From Home to School,” and individual and program variables.

INFERENCE AND GENERALIZABILITY IN APPLIED LINGUISITCS: MULTIPLE PERSPECTIVES.Micheline Chalhoub-Deville, Carol Chapelle, and Patricia Duff (Eds.). Amsterdam: Benjamins, 2006. Pp. 249. $42.95 paper.

This volume is a collection of 10 chapters by leading specialists in applied linguistics. Generalizability is defined as “the extent to which research results can justifiably be applied to a situation beyond the research setting” (p. 3). Inferences are the links that the researcher makes between observations of the learners' data and their interpretation as evidence of theoretical arguments.

This special issue has attempted to ascertain the universal applicability of the noun phrase accessibility hierarchy (NPAH; Keenan & Comrie, 1977) by extending previous research in this area, which has focused on English and a few other European languages, to East Asian languages. To this end, five empirical studies have been reported; these studies yielded mixed results with regard to their support for the NPAH. Overall, what is striking to me in these results is the fact that despite the expectation of some researchers to find robust counterevidence to the NPAH, many of these studies ended up finding at least partial support for the NPAH, even in East Asian languages.

AUCHANDNOCH IN CHILD AND ADULT GERMAN. Ulrike Nederstigt. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 2003. Pp. xiii + 406. $106.00 cloth.

Nederstigt's volume offers a detailed and comprehensive treatment of the usage and acquisition of two German focus particles, auch (roughly “also”) and noch (roughly “still”). In view of the ubiquity of auch and noch in adult language and their early emergence in first language (L1) development, Nederstigt's work is a substantial addition to the as-yet small body of existing research. This study is an impressively thorough and rigorous analysis of auch and noch in both adult and child speech that emphasizes the importance of investigating natural spoken discourse to gain maximally informative insights into patterns of usage and sequences of acquisition.

The study of relative clauses (RCs) has been central to both theoretical linguistics and studies in acquisition. This thematic issue of Studies in Second Language Acquisition makes a very important new contribution in this area by highlighting recent developments in thinking on the structure of RCs crosslinguistically and by introducing new data on the acquisition of Japanese, Korean, and Cantonese as first languages (L1s) and second languages (L2s). In this commentary, I will focus on two themes that emerge from the articles: representation and processing of RCs.

DECOLONISATION, GLOBALISATION: LANGUAGE-IN-EDUCATION POLICY AND PRACTICE. Angel M. Y. Lin and Peter W. Martin (Eds.). Clevedon, UK: Multilingual Matters, 2005. Pp. xix + 204. $89.95 cloth, $39.95 paper.

This collection of 10 studies from Asian and African contexts begins with a general introduction by Luke that links many strands and challenges to current radical educational thinking as well as an introduction by the two editors; it terminates with a conclusion with reflections by Canagarajah. The editors present an intellectually challenging framework for reading the country studies and draw on themes to articulate a case for rethinking much language-in-education policy. Their hope is that the volume goes beyond state-of-the art description and theorization and can lead from coherent deconstruction to proactive reconstruction. This is needed because many of our analytical categories remain simplistic, and inadequate educational policy leads to the perpetuation of social inequalities. A key paradox is the widespread demand for more English, although English does not serve all equally well. Many do not develop high-level competence, whereas dominant groups or classes are groomed for the economy of globalization that has dashed most decolonization hopes. Across differing country reports, the pattern is of an “emptying out of the ‘linguistic local’ and the one-sided pursuit of the ‘linguistic global’” (p. 9).

LANGUAGE, SPACE AND POWER: A CRITICAL LOOK AT BILINGUAL EDUCATION.Samina Hadi-Tabassum. Clevedon, UK: Multilingual Matters, 2006. Pp. v + 295. $50.55 paper.

As a former bilingual teacher in a dual-language school in Chicago, I approached Hadi-Tabassum's work not only with interest but with an insider's perspective on dual-language instruction. As promised, the volume provides rich descriptions of a fifth-grade dual-language classroom and documents key events that occurred throughout the school year. Situated within a discussion of language, space, and power, the author's quest for evidence of metalinguistic awareness in the context of classroom events is an ambitious project, but, at times, the framework overshadows a more practical interpretation of classroom life.

SECOND LANGUAGE WRITING SYSTEMS.Vivian Cook and Benedetta Bassetti (Eds.). Clevedon, UK: Multilingual Matters, 2005. Pp. xi + 448. $69.95 cloth.

This wide-ranging collection explores the oft-neglected question of how writing systems impact the learning of second language (L2) reading and writing. The excitement with which I greeted this volume was sustained by the introductory chapter in which the two editors, both linguists at University of Essex, United Kingdom, present an overview of research in L2 writing systems.

LANGUAGE MINORITY STUDENTS IN AMERICAN SCHOOLS: AN EDUCATION IN ENGLISH.H. Douglas Adamson. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum, 2005. Pp. vii + 294. $34.50 paper.

In this theoretical-empirical textbook, Adamson presents an authoritative and critical overview of the application of behavioral and cognitive, psycholinguistic, and linguistic paradigms to the particular educational and linguistic needs of English language learners (ELLs) in U.S. schools. Each paradigm alone fails to fully account for the complexities of ELL instruction. To solve this shortcoming, Adamson applies the Vygotskian sociocultural model of learning and cognitive development, a model that integrates external behavioral and internal cognitive factors. Adamson's balanced writing includes the nation's social and political views of ELL education as well as the arguments of critics of ELL instruction, arguments he does not leave uncontested. A noteworthy dimension of this work is how the author strengthens his argument with his extensive English as a second language (ESL) and English as a foreign language teaching experience in the United States and abroad as well as his research in the field, including the report of a year-long case study of ELLs enrolled in a middle school in Arizona. The discussions of the vignettes and of the case-study results afford readers the opportunity to learn about the variables and complexities of ELL instruction through the lens of a constructivist researcher.

FOCUS ON FRENCH AS A FOREIGN LANGUAGE: MULTIDISCIPLINARY APPROACHES. Jean-Marc Dewaele (Ed.). Clevedon, UK: Multilingual Matters, 2005. Pp. x + 242. $79.96 cloth, $39.96 paper.

This volume is a collection of 10 chapters that report on various research projects in SLA, all relating to the learning of French or the nature of French second language (L2) interlanguage (IL). Although the use of the descriptor “multidisciplinary” seems a bit of a stretch, a range of specific research questions is addressed, in varying contexts, including the acquisition of French as a L2 or foreign language, in naturalistic or instructional contexts, by speakers of various first languages (L1s) and at beginning or, often, advanced stages of acquisition. Whereas the volume naturally takes its place in what the editor refers to as “the Anglo-Saxon SLA world” (p. viii) with strong representation of the Universal Grammar perspective, there are also contributors working in variationist sociolinguistics and a traditional psycholinguistic framework.

EMOTIONS AND MULTILINGUALISM. Aneta Pavlenko. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Pp. v + 304. $90.00 cloth.

Pavlenko's preface captures one's attention immediately. She believes that writing about human beings should include personal as well as scholarly insights. She then proceeds to demonstrate the value of the personal perspective, beginning with her own bilingual experience as a student of linguistics. She reports that, as a student, she continually asked questions of her teachers about bilingual issues because they were marginalized in her training. As a result of this marginalization, she is firmly committed to exposing the monolingual bias in all areas of linguistic research; she also rejects the view that language is a static system. Emotions, she argues, have been undertheorized in bilingual studies and SLA. Pavlenko brings new attention to research from SLA, bilingual studies, ethnographies, psycholinguistics, psychology, neurophsychology, memoirs, and anecdotes from her own life. The methodologies and research questions differ, as do the definitions of emotion in these fields. Pavlenko presents a comprehensive examination of relevant literature in all of these areas and frames that exploration with probing questions and results from her own research (a Web-based survey) and experience. She examines both emotion terms and emotion repertoires and asks: For multilingual speakers, are these repertoires distinct? Do they refer to universal notions of emotion varying only in their linguistic expression?

A valuable perspective can be gained by examining whether claims about certain linguistic phenomena that were made largely based on observations from particular languages still hold for similar constructions in typologically different languages. This thematic issue contributes to SLA research in this respect by rethinking the putative universal influence of the noun phrase accessibility hierarchy (NPAH; Keenan & Comrie, 1977) on the acquisition of relative clause (RC) constructions in a second language (L2). The NPAH has been strongly supported by numerous studies in English and other European languages such as French, Italian, and Swedish; the articles in this special issue examine L2 RC acquisition in East Asian languages such as Japanese, Korean, and Chinese.