Researchers interested in second language attrition have studied a wide variety of bilingual
speakers, ranging from foreign language students who learned a language through classroom
study to those who have developed high proficiency during life abroad. What these studies have in
common is their investigation of questions related to bilingual speakers' loss of L2
knowledge or proficiency. Hansen's collection of papers presents research on a range of
bilingual speakers who have the Japanese language in common, whether that language is their L1
or L2. The book is divided into two major sections. The first section, consisting of three papers,
presents studies of Japanese children of elementary school age who learned English while living
abroad but who have returned to Japan. This section will be of interest to EFL teachers of
children as well as to L2 researchers. The four papers in the second section of the book examine
the attrition of Japanese by adults. Most of these adults became subjects while residing in the
United States after working or studying in Japan. The adults studied in these chapters had a
variety of different combinations of exposure and formal study and also a broad range of years
away from Japan, from 9 months to 30+ years. Additionally, the subjects of one study never lived
in Japan at all but learned Japanese during Japan's occupation of Micronesia.