In her engrossing account of the historical relationship between theory and practice in secondlanguage teaching, Diane Musumeci observes that in the often contentious discussions about thisrelationship “the one point on which almost everyone agrees is that scant evidence existsto support any single, unified theory of language learning” (p. 3). In BreakingTradition: An Exploration of the Historical Relationship Between Theory and Practice in SecondLanguage Teaching, Musumeci convincingly argues that the claim that there has been noconsistent theory of second language teaching is not only ahistorical but has also discouragedcritical investigation of the ideas of tradition and innovation in the field.