DISCOURS, ACTION ET APPROPRIATION DES LANGUES [Discourse,
action, and appropriation of languages]. Francine Cicurel and
Daniel Véronique (Eds.). Paris: Presses Sorbonne Nouvelle,
2002. Pp. 286. €19.00 paper.
As the words “discourse” and “action” in the
title suggest, this volume focuses on the pragmatic aspects of SLA with
a selection of refereed articles from the 1999 conference
Acquisition d'une langue étrangère: perspectives
et recherches “Acquisition of a foreign language:
Perspectives and research” with the theme Usages pragmatiques
et acquisition d'une langue étrangère
“Pragmatic uses and acquisition of a foreign language.” In
the introduction, the editors provide a brief overview of SLA research
with a clear emphasis on pragmatic issues—for example,
differences between naturalistic and classroom acquisition in terms of
social contexts and interactional patterns. The volume contains three
thematic sections followed by an epilogue featuring the written version
of three contributions that served as a synthesis at the end of the
conference. Each section is followed by grouped bibliographic
references. This particular organization is a little off-putting,
especially because this editorial choice is never clearly mentioned in
the text. Further, the reference sections are somewhat sloppy with
spelling inconsistencies for author names (Vygotski and Vygotsky),
publication dates in the bibliography that do not always correspond to
the article citations, and several in-text references omitted from the
bibliography.