STRUCTURED INPUT: GRAMMAR INSTRUCTION FOR THE ACQUISITION-ORIENTED CLASSROOM. Andrew P. Farley. Boston: McGraw-Hill, 2005. Pp. vii + 123. $51.56 paper.

This volume for second language teachers builds on two principles of structured input (SI; VanPatten, 2004): the primacy of meaning principle and the first noun principle. After an overview of SI, Farley provides chapter-length explanations of teaching activities based on the two SI principles and concludes with a chapter on recent SI research. The three core SI activity-preparation chapters are organized around (a) an introduction to the SI principle focused on in the chapter, (b) a research review, (c) examples from various languages, (d) “principles in practice” to guide teachers in writing SI activities, (e) sample studies, and (f) suggested readings. The technique recommended for activities involves the creation of controlled tasks that limit information available to students so that only one grammatical point is salient. For example, an activity on English subject-verb agreement requires the learner to select the correct present tense verb for a given subject; one singular subject (“Sarah McLachlan”) and one plural subject (“Bono and the Edge”) are followed by only two choices: one with a verb in the singular (“travels all over the world”) and one with a verb in the plural (“play the guitar”). The logic of this activity is that language learners look to meaning first and, therefore, often overlook form, so activities can force focus on form by limiting content and restricting grammatical choice. (My own experience of this type of grammar drill is that students have a 50% chance of getting the correct answer without having to think about either meaning or form.)