On April 23rd of this year, at the initiative of the current group of editorial assistants(Elizabeth Grace Winkler, Llorenç Comajoan, and Donald F. Reindl), a symposium wasorganized on the Bloomington campus of Indiana University to celebrate the 20th anniversary ofSSLA's founding. Presentations on the past, present, and future state ofresearch on second language acquisition were presented by Editorial Board and AdvisoryCommittee members Susan Gass, John Schumann, Kathleen Bardovi-Harlig, and PatsyLightbown. It is noteworthy that this commemorative event, the creation of SSLA,would not have taken place without the direct intervention of another group of graduate students,the Indiana University Linguistics Club. Without the IULC producing and disseminating thefledgling publication that was SSLA in 1978, the journal would never have made itbeyond the drawing board. In this note prefacing the last issue of Volume 20, I would like tonarrate the conditions of SSLA's birth and comment on the journal'scontribution to second language acquisition research.

Two hypotheses regarding the distribution of emergent tense-aspect morphology in SLAhave been proposed: the aspect hypothesis, which claims the distribution of interlanguage verbalmorphology is determined by lexical aspectual class, and the discourse hypothesis, which claimsit is determined by narrative structure. Recent studies have tested and supported both hypothesesindividually. This study expands the investigation to include an analysis of both narrativestructure and lexical aspectual class in a single corpus comprising 74 narratives (37 oral andwritten pairs) produced by adult learners of English as a second language at various proficiencylevels. The results suggest that both hypotheses are necessary to account for the distribution ofverbal morphology in interlanguage.

This study investigates children's changing sensitivity to processing cues foridentifying agent (word order, case marking, and animacy) as a function of proficiency in asecond language. English-speaking learners of Japanese need to appropriately adjust cuestrengths in moving from a rigid SVO language to one in which SOV word order is a goodgeneral processing strategy, but case marking must ultimately be relied on if it conflicts with thisorder. English-speaking children in grades K–7 in an immersion school were asked toidentify the agent for a set of audiotaped sentences in English and Japanese. The children in thisstudy learned to use SOV word order, lexical semantics, and canonical case marking, but they donot provide evidence of appropriately exploiting noncanonical case marking. We suggest thatthese results might be accounted for by the context in which input is processed in immersionschool classrooms.

This study investigated the acquisition of the comprehension of overt morphological casemarking by adult native speakers of English who were learning Russian or German as a secondlanguage (L2). The Russian case-marking system is more complex than the German system, butit almost always provides the listener with case inflections that are reliable cues to sentenceinterpretation. Two approaches to learning of inflectional morphology were contrasted: therule-based approach, which predicts that learning is determined by paradigm complexity; and theassociative approach, which predicts that learning is determined by the cue validity of individualinflections. A computerized picture-choice task probed the comprehension of L2 learners byvarying the cues of case marking, noun configuration, and noun animacy. The resultsdemonstrated that learners of Russian use case marking much earlier than learners of Germanand that learners of German rely more on animacy to supplement the weaker case-marking cue.In order to further explore the underlying mechanisms of learning, a connectionist model wasdeveloped that correctly simulated the obtained results. Together, these findings support the viewthat adult L2 learning is associative and driven by the validity of cues in the input.

How transparent a title is Genesee and Upshur's (G & U) Classroom-BasedEvaluation in Second Language Education? First, the word “evaluation.”These days “evaluation” is so commonly attached collocationally to programs andprojects that when it stands alone it is usually taken to mean evaluation of programs or projects.G & U seem to use evaluation in the more micro sense of the assessment of individualachievement within the classroom context, taking into account the teacher's purposes,plans, and practices.

These books represent two of the most recent additions to the growing number ofintroductory texts designed to be used as main or supporting resources in academic courses onpragmatics. Although each is intended for use by readers with little or no background in the field,they differ considerably.

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.

Savignon writes in her book, Communicative Competence Theory and ClassroomPractice: Texts and Contexts in Second Language Learning (2nd ed.), that thecommunicative approach to language teaching has become so popular that many materialsdevelopers have jumped on the bandwagon, claiming a communicative focus to their materials.She writes, “What ‘nutritious’ and ‘natural’ are today tobreakfast foods, ‘communicative’ and ‘functional’ are to languagetexts. How much change has actually taken place is debatable. Just as cereals containing‘all natural’ honey are no less sweet, so ‘asking questions’ may beno more than a new label for an old unit on the formation of the interrogative” (p.138).

This eclectic volume represents a selection of 17 papers from the Seventh Congress of theInternational Association for the Study of Child Language held in Trieste in 1993. They cover awide range of languages, including Swedish, Italian, German, Spanish, a group of Bantulanguages, Polish, Sign Language of the Netherlands (SLN), Hebrew, American Sign Language(ASL), and English, and a wide range of topics and frameworks. Although almost all the paperscan be mined by SLA researchers, I will mention five papers that might be of particularinterest.

This edited volume consists of 20 chapters, and all but 3 are written in Spanish. The chaptersare grouped under four major sections: the classroom, the standard language, teaching languagethrough culture, and political aspects of the maintenance of Spanish. Each section is preceded byan overview.