The last thirty years have witnessed considerable research in the fields of second languageacquisition (SLA) and second language teaching (SLT). However, most of this research has beenconcerned with second languages such as English, Spanish, French, and German. There has beencomparatively little research on the less commonly taught second languages such as Hindi andother South Asian languages. As the editor states in the preface, enrollment in courses on SouthAsian languages has rapidly grown in universities in the United States and there is an urgent needfor 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 bothresearchers and practitioners in the teaching and learning of South Asian languages.

The conditions (implicit or explicit) under which exposure to L2 input takes place and thelevel of awareness raised while processing input may be strongly related to the learning process.This study investigates how intake was affected both by awareness and by the conditions underwhich a problem-solving task was performed. Spanish conditional sentences were presented tolearners through five different degrees of explicitness, which were the result of combining thefactors [±formal instruction] and [±directions to search for rules]. Intake wasmeasured through a multiple-choice recognition test administered immediately after theexperimental task. Level of awareness was assessed by means of think-aloud protocols collectedduring input processing. Results indicate that (a) the degrees of explicitness had a differentialeffect on intake, (b) the higher the level of awareness demonstrated, the stronger the effect onintake, and (c) the conditions under which the task was administered influenced the wayinformation was processed.

Communication Strategies: Psycholinguistic and Sociolinguistic Perspectives isnot 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 differenttheoretical and analytical perspectives, research methodologies, and the role of cultural andlinguistic backgrounds.

This book is for teachers who instruct “the culturally and linguisticallydiverse learner” (p. ix, et passim) in the United States; it reflects Americancommunity relations today. The editor's intention is to “assist you [the Americanteacher] in creating a sociocultural context for literacy learning within your classroomcommunity of learners” (p. xi).

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

This essay defends the idea that language is a unique, genetically underwritten(informationally encapsulated) “module of the mind” and considers someconsequences such a stance holds for the psycholinguistic study of nonnative language (L2)acquisition. As is well known, language as conceived within the tradition of generative grammar(e.g., Chomsky, 1965, 1975, 1980, 1986) is unlike other types of cognition and its basis (viz.,Universal Grammar) is innately given; this is the position I support in this paper. Specifically, Ibegin by summarizing the main arguments for this position, after which I discuss (followingSegal, 1996) four different conceptions of what a module is and then devote particular attentionto the theory developed by Fodor (1983, 1985) on the architecture of mind (his“modularity thesis”). There follows a comparison between the distinct views heldby Chomsky and by Fodor on the conception of “the language module” and on thestructure of mind more generally. Arguing that the two views are not inherently incompatible, Ioffer a speculation on how to begin to reconcile them, which leaves me well positioned toadvance three specific implications for the theoretical study of L2 acquisition within theframework of generative grammar, couched within a theory of the modular mind.

Research has been investigating the role of reading, as one source of input, in languagelearners' vocabulary development. The present study was designed to examine whetherintermediate learners incidentally (a) acquire and (b) retain unknown vocabulary as a result ofreading. The study further assessed (c) the effect of the text variable of exposure frequency.Learners were exposed to unfamiliar words either two, four, or six times during reading.Vocabulary acquisition and retention measured productive and receptive knowledge gain.Results indicated that only two encounters with unfamiliar words during reading significantlyaffected learners' vocabulary growth. Moreover, two or four exposure frequencies resultedin fairly similar word gain, but six exposures produced significantly more vocabulary knowledge.Retention measures showed mixed results: On productive vocabulary knowledge only half of thesubjects displayed a significant rate of retention. On receptive knowledge all but oneexperimental group retained vocabulary over 4 weeks.

Using a conversation analytical, social interactionist approach to cognition, Woottonexamines the requests made by his daughter between 18 and 36 months of age in interaction withher parents. He analyzes in detail “distressing events” or seemingly irrationaltemper tantrums to develop a theory of cognitive development based on the sequentiality ofconversational interaction. By correlating her use of imperatives and, later, of more polite formsof requests, Wootton is able to show how the child identifies and draws on expectations of sharedunderstanding, established through local interactional sequences of conversation, to develop hersense of cognitive relevance and moral rectitude. The intensity of the child's distress atseeing her expectations flouted leads Wootton to claim that the nature of these understandings islocal, public, and moral: The child's cultural awareness is fashioned and criticallyconditioned precisely by those forms of sequential and interactional organization she begins tocome to grips with at about the age of 2.

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

This volume, the third in the Studies in Bilingualism series from the EuropeanScience Foundation's research on adult immigrants' L2 acquisition, begins with theobservation that we have widely accepted the idea that learners' varieties and thetransitions from one variety to the next are systematic, yet we have little research that records thissystematicity. This study does exactly that by following for 30 months 10 L2 learners'developing linguistic means for indicating spatial relations. Carroll reports on two Italianspeakers acquiring English; Becker on four Italian speakers and a Turkish speaker acquiringGerman; and Giacobbe, Perdue, and Porquier on two Spanish speakers and a Moroccan Arabicspeaker acquiring French. To elicit the core data, the researchers asked the learners to describepictures and to provide stage directions for a scene they had viewed to someone who had notseen it.

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 workrather than being led by technological innovation, and (c) “understand better therelationship 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. Theauthor bases the book on previous work and addresses a perpetual problem inCALL—reinventing the wheel. Moreover, Levy links the history of CALL with thepresent and combines a very thorough literature review with survey data about CALL materialsdevelopment.

This book is a timely and important contribution to the study of language acquisition. Itshould be of value to those engaged in active research in this field, as well as to the generalreader with an interest in language acquisition and linguistics. The papers are rather technical andmay be difficult for the general reader, but the introductory essay by the editor, Brent, goes a longway to provide the background and describe the contents of the other essays in a morecomprehensible language for the nontechnical reader. It should be pointed out, however, that thisbook is about language acquisition in general (including the theory of learning), particularly thecomputational approach in the research. It is not specifically concerned with second languageacquisition.

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

Grauberg has undertaken the ambitious task of presenting in a relatively short book thelinguistic and pedagogical aspects of teaching French and German as foreign languages. Despitemany serious omissions, including a framework for discussing language proficiency, hisclassroom observations may prove useful for future French and German teachers.

We are grateful to Hidetoshi Saito for his careful and reasoned critique of theVARBRUL procedure in his article, “Dependence and Interaction in Frequency DataAnalysis in SLA Research” (this issue). Saito reanalyzes Young's (1988, 1991)study of -s plural variation in the English interlanguage of native speakers of Chinese.He raises two criticisms of the statistical analyses in the original work: (a) data from allparticipants were lumped together, resulting in an analysis that ignores possible variation acrossparticipants; and (b) interaction between independent variables was not investigated, whereasSaito finds that an interaction term contributes to a statistical model that fits the data better thanthe original analysis.

This book is a compilation of informative chapters containing selected papers(1988–1995) that first appeared in the English Language Teaching Journal,edited by Hedge and Whitney. The chapters have been reorganized “to provide a usefulresource for teachers, trainee teachers, teacher educators, students, and researchers” (p.1).

As I was preparing to do a workshop on research in second language acquisition,Evaluating research articles by Girden arrived on my desk. The timing was perfect andI was pleased to have this additional resource at my disposal. The book is designed for awide-ranging audience, with examples presented from a variety of fields (e.g., social work,education, medicine, and psychology), although second language acquisition is not among them.The studies cited as examples include studies that are flawed in one way or the other, with theauthor leading the reader to understand the flaws.

In SLA research, dependence in frequency data is a prevalent problem (Hatch &Lazaraton, 1991). Researchers usually regard the data as being independent and subject them tostatistical analyses. Another problem in frequency data analysis in SLA research is the exclusionof interaction terms. This is the case because of the use of chi-square analysis or the unpopularityof multifactorial frequency data analyses. This study investigates the violation of the“independent observation” assumption as well as the effect of includinginteraction terms in frequency data analysis. Reanalyzing a couple of published data sets, thepaper argues in favor of using multifactorial frequency data analyses over multiple chi-squares inorder to take into account dependence and interaction of the frequency data. A set ofrecommendations for SLA researchers will be provided when statistically analyzing frequencydata in SLA research.

This paper has two main objectives: (a) to put the vast body of research on Swedish as asecond language (SSL) into one coherent framework; and (b) to test the predictions derivingfrom processability theory (Pienemann, 1998a, 1998b) for Swedish against this empiricaldatabase. We will survey the 14 most prominent research projects on SSL covering wide areas ofsyntax and morphology in longitudinal and cross-sectional studies. This survey is the first to becarried out for Swedish, and it will bring the body of two decades of research into one unifiedframework. We proceed in the following steps: First, a brief summary of processability theory isgiven. Then the theory is used to generate a unifying framework for the development of thespecific L2 grammatical system (Swedish). Finally, the new framework is tested in theabove-mentioned empirical studies.

This study addresses one of the functions of output proposed by Swain (1993, 1995, 1998).In particular, the activity of producing the target language may, under certain circumstances,prompt L2 learners to recognize some of their linguistic problems and bring to their attentionsomething they need to discover about their L2. Two research questions were posed: (a) Doesoutput promote noticing of linguistic form? and (b) Does output result in improved performanceon the target form? In treatment phase 1, participants reconstructed a short passage after beingexposed to it, followed by a second exposure to the same input material and a secondreconstruction opportunity. In phase 2, participants wrote on given topics, followed by thepresentation of a model written by a native speaker. Participants wrote a second time on the sametopic. To test the noticing function of output, participants underlined parts of the sentences theythought were “particularly necessary” for subsequent (re)production. The controlgroup was exposed to the same input materials but was not required to produce any output.Although phase 1 tasks resulted in noticing and immediate incorporation of the target form, theposttest performance failed to reveal their effects. In contrast, phase 2 tasks resulted inimprovement on posttest 2. The results are discussed in terms of the efficacy of output inpromoting noticing and learning and the conditions that may be required for output to be usefulfor SLA.