This volume is very much in the North American tradition; it is an edited collection of papersoriginally presented at a conference (the Twenty-Second University ofWisconsin–Milwaukee Linguistics Symposium on Second Language Acquisition). Thebook represents both the strengths and weaknesses of its origins.

Three years ago we ushered in a new rubric of SSLA, Replication Studies. Webelieved—and still do—as did many researchers and consumers of second languageand foreign language (S/FL) acquisition research that the problems of reliability andgeneralizability are best resolved through attempts at replication. We realized that the system ofrewards in academe inhibited investment in research that could be viewed as lacking originality.However, we have been gratified by the response from workers in our field who perceived thepotential contribution of replication studies and have availed themselves of this newvenue.

This most recent exposition of Chomsky's ideas about the language faculty strives toreach a deeper level of explanatory adequacy. Rather than the question of “What doesknowledge of language consist of?” Chomsky asks the question “Why is thelanguage faculty the way it is?” His basic answer to this question is the following: Twosorts of conditions are imposed on the language faculty, conditions arising from its place in thecognitive architecture “bare output conditions” and conditions of conceptualnaturalness such as economy, simplicity, and nonredundancy. Minimalism is thus a call fortheoretical simplicity with respect to the constructs used to explain language phenomena:“It is all too easy to succumb to the temptation to offer purported explanation for somephenomenon on the basis of assumptions that are roughly of the order of complexity of what is tobe explained. . . . Minimalist demands at least have the merit of highlighting such moves, thussharpening the question of whether we have a genuine explanation or a restatement of theproblem in other terms” (pp. 234–235).

This study examines how two types of word knowledge, word associations and grammaticalsuffix knowledge, change over time both receptively and productively. Ninety-five secondary andpostsecondary Japanese students were tested on three word associations and inflectional andderivational suffixes for each of 20 verbs, once near the beginning of their academic year andonce near the end. The results showed their average vocabulary gain was 330 words. Thestudents showed rather poor knowledge of the allowable suffixes for the verbs, especially thederivative suffixes. Likewise, the subjects did not show very good mastery of the verbs'word associations. Even for verbs rated as known, the students as a group were able to produceonly about 50% of the word associations possible on the test as judged by native speaker norms.Word association knowledge and suffix knowledge were shown to correlate with each other andwith total vocabulary size. The subjects overall had from 19 to 25 percentage points morereceptive knowledge than productive knowledge.

Many SLA researchers have demonstrated an interest in language pedagogy (LP), yetthe relationship between SLA and LP is a problematic one, not so much because of thelimitations of SLA itself but because the two disciplines involve different“Discourses” (Gee, 1990). In this paper it is argued that an educational perspectiveis needed in order to examine how SLA can contribute to LP. Such a perspective suggests waysin which SLA can be appraised in a pedagogically relevant manner and, more importantly, whatkinds of applications may be fruitful. It is suggested that relevance is more likely to be achievedif SLA is used to address issues that practitioners nominate as important to them. Differentmodels of application are considered, reflecting different ways of viewing teaching. A behavioralmodel, according to which teachers implement those behaviors that research has shown to beeffective, is rejected. However, SLA can serve as an important source of information that canhelp to shape practitioners' theories of teaching (a cognitive model). Most importantly, itconstitutes a source of “provisional specifications” that practitioners can evaluatein their own contexts of action (an interpretation model). SLA also affords practitioners themeans for conducting their own investigations. In short, an educational perspective suggests thatfor SLA to influence LP, practitioners need assistance in transforming knowledge about L2acquisition into practice.

This study was designed to extend previous research on the relationships amongintelligibility, perceived comprehensibility, and accentedness. Accent and comprehensibilityratings and transcriptions of accented speech from Cantonese, Japanese, Polish, and Spanishintermediate ESL students were obtained from 26 native English listeners. The listeners werealso asked to identify the first language backgrounds of the same talkers and to provideinformation on their familiarity with the four accents used in this study. When the results of thisstudy were compared with the Munro and Derwing (1995, Language Learning,45, 73–97) study of learners of high proficiency, speaker proficiency level didnot appear to affect the quasi-independent relationships among intelligibility, perceivedcomprehensibility, and accentedness; however, the relative contributions of grammatical andphonemic errors and goodness of prosody differed somewhat. Ability to identify thespeakers' first languages was influenced by familiarity.

This book, like its four predecessors, consists of invited articles selected from presentationsat the previous year's International Conference on Pragmatics and Language Learning. In areview of this length, it would be unreasonable to attempt to do justice to all 18 articles, so I willconcentrate on a few of the theoretically oriented discussions and provide a brief overview of therest.

This collection of papers is offered to “serve as a foundation point to illuminate therange of considerations and approaches” in language test construct validation research (p.12), and it succeeds admirably. The studies represent a useful sample of validation researchquestions and methods. Research methods are carefully described and motivated, and manychapters have appendices containing original research materials. Discussion and interpretation ofthe results seem abridged in a few studies, but collectively the chapters present a clear and usefulpicture of the complexity of construct validation research.

This book is one in a series aimed at introducing teachers with little background inlinguistics and applied linguistics to a range of language-related issues. Other books in the seriesinclude Introducing Applied Linguistics, Introducing Discourse Analysis, andIntroducing Listening. This book by van Lier has the goal of developing “anunderstanding of the human faculty of language and its role in thinking, learning and sociallife” (p. xi). Chapter 2, “The Building Blocks of Language,” brieflyintroduces readers to the phonetic alphabet, assimilation, intonation, morphemes, and syntax.Readers of SSLA (who are not the intended audience) will find, because of itsintroductory nature, that it does not take them far in their knowledge of language awareness.Teachers new to applied linguistics will find it very accessible and easy to read.

As part of the Cambridge Language Teaching Library series, this book provides a solidintroduction to vocabulary and semantics for teachers and teacher trainers involved in languageeducation. The authors maintain a multidisciplinary perspective on these topics by including bothL1 and L2 views and research from linguistics, psychology, anthropology, cognitive science, andeducation.

This article presents a study of corrective feedback and learner uptake (i.e., responses tofeedback) in four immersion classrooms at the primary level. Transcripts totaling 18.3 hours ofclassroom interaction taken from 14 subject-matter lessons and 13 French language arts lessonswere analyzed using a model developed for the study and comprising the various moves in anerror treatment sequence. Results include the frequency and distribution of the six differentfeedback types used by the four teachers, in addition to the frequency and distribution of differenttypes of learner uptake following each feedback type. The findings indicate an overwhelmingtendency for teachers to use recasts in spite of the latter's ineffectiveness at elicitingstudent-generated repair. Four other feedback types—elicitation, metalinguistic feedback,clarification requests, and repetition—lead to student-generated repair more successfullyand are thus able to initiate what the authors characterize as the negotiation of form.

Language Contact, Language Conflict treats the increasingly commonphenomenon of language contact and the subsequent cultural influences that contact can entail.The collection of papers is the result of a symposium held in Duisburg in March 1992 and isdivided into two sections: (a) theoretical linguistic issues and (b) case studies from throughoutthe world. In the foreword, Hymes admits his skepticism toward the search for universals inlinguistics, cognition, and human nature when “so much of anger as of joy is in thedetails” and, therefore, to preserve humanity, “the complex, emergentconfigurations of particular languages and ways of life are what need to be understood andshared” (foreword, no page number).

This collection of 28 papers was first presented at the 1994 GURT. The theme of theconference was educational linguistics, crosscultural communication, and globalinterdependence. The vastness of the theme is reflected in the diversity of the chapter topics.Twelve of 28 deal with curricular issues. Of these, those by Kachru, Nyikos, D. Freeman, vanLier, Loew, and Richards discuss issues and concerns broadly related to the preparation oflanguage teachers. D. Freeman's chapter is worthy of note because it offers an interestingdiscussion on the various strands of scholarship, which he suggests comprise the knowledge baseof language teaching. Six of the 12 chapters center on curricular issues for the languageclassroom. Matters relating to the teaching of culture are dealt with by Oxford and Bamgbose.Brown discusses “responsive language teaching.” Citkina reports on innovativeforeign language methods recently introduced in the Ukraine. A good discussion oncomputer-mediated communication and its usefulness to the language classroom is offered byStauffer. Pica provides an excellent overview of the research on task-related learning and anequally useful discussion of its pedagogical implications.

The connection between SLA research and second and foreign language (S/FL) teachingis discussed in this paper, from the viewpoint that such a relationship is desirable and that it isadvantageous to see it as one mediated by a variety of factors. At the same time, it is asserted thatthe relationship is presently often weaker than it should be. The conditions under whichS/FL language teaching take place are identified as strongly contributing to this state ofaffairs, though other aspects of SLA research that might have limited its relevance to teaching arealso considered. A call is made for empirical studies into the use by teachers of research.

This study replicates VanPatten and Cadierno (1993) in an attempt to determine whether or not explicit information given to learners receiving processing instruction is responsible for the beneficial effects of instruction. Fifty-nine subjects were divided into three groups: (1) one receiving processing instruction in object pronouns and word order in Spanish as in VanPatten and Cadierno (1993), (2) another receiving explanation only with no activities or practice, (3) and another receiving only the structured input activities with no explanation. A pretest/post-test assessment was used involving two tests, an interpretation test and a sentence-level production test. Results showed that the beneficial effects of instruction were due to the structured input activities and not to the explicit information (explanation) provided to learners.