This volume is a fascinating, erudite, gripping, and well-researched work on a subject that many of us would expect to find dry, dull, and for academics only. John Man has succeeded, however, in taking and transforming the topic into a highly readable and very accessible book that reads like a whodunit from beginning to end. He traces the origins of the alphabet, from 4,000 years ago to modern times, taking us on captivating and exotic excursions along the way: how the Exodus might have come about; who the Phoenicians were and how they got their name; how Cyrillic came into being; how Times Roman has come to be one of the most popular and recognizable typefaces today.

This peer commentary emphasizes the importance of placing frequency in an overarching theoretical framework of language acquisition. Three issues are raised that appear to be both important and timely: (a) the question of how innate, or initial, cognition can deal with stimulus frequency; (b) the likelihood that frequency has a differential impact depending on the type of knowledge concerned; and (c) preliminary evidence that frequency affects receptive language knowledge more than productive knowledge, which raises the issue of a possible dissociation between the two knowledge types.

In this volume of the Sociolinguistics in Deaf Communities series, Metzger has edited 11 diverse topics addressing two themes: the perception of Deaf people and Deaf communities, and bilingualism. Deaf people's perception of themselves and their community is explored by authors who discuss an excellent array of topics, ranging from “miracle cures” for Deaf children in Mexico to the nature of name signs in the New Zealand Deaf community; from the linguistic rights of Deaf people in the European Union to a search for the roots of the Nicaraguan Deaf community; from a semiotic analysis of Argentine Sign Language to an analysis of how a Deaf child (American Sign Language) and his hearing family (English) make sense of each other's world views.

This book, which appears in a series called Langues en Péril“languages in peril,” is an accessible and well-written panoramic view of the French-based creoles spoken in the Caribbean and the Indian Ocean. In her introductory remarks, author Marie-Christine Hazaël-Massieux addresses the confusions regarding the notions of language and dialect, presenting clearly and concisely how a linguistic system can be a language without being written or prestigious or belonging to any given geographical region. She touches on why some of the French-based creoles, such as Louisiana Creole French, may be endangered and extends the definition of an endangered language to include cases in which a creole can lose its “creoleness” through decreolization. This allows her also to discuss the question of diversity among French-based creoles, although, as she points out, this rich diversity is often overlooked for ideological or other reasons.

This collection originated from a conference held in Braunschweig, Germany, in June 1998 at which participants were invited to analyze the role of English as a global language and to develop research perspectives for its teaching and learning. Written by nonnative as well as native speakers of English (working in English-speaking countries where English is not a native language), the articles provide a basis for consideration of whether “the concept of English as a global language is assessed differently by experts depending upon whether they are native or non-native speakers of English and if so, to what extent” (Introduction).

Nick Ellis's article is impressive for its breadth of scholarship and the cogent case made for frequency as an important factor in second language acquisition (SLA). This response begins with a brief historical sketch, which aims to contextualize the frequency factor in terms of the evolution of SLA research. Although researchers have known about a frequency effect for some time, until recently, we have lacked neurologically plausible models and technologically convenient means of measuring and testing frequency effects in input. Still, as relevant and important as a frequency factor is, it requires greater definition and qualification. For instance, L2 learners are agents of their own learning process. They do not merely record frequency; they categorize frequently occurring patterns, abstract, and generalize from them. Higher level generalizations emerge from interactions, impose top-down expectancies on future data, and, in turn, are altered by the data in a perpetually dynamic interplay. In a similar fashion, it is incumbent on SLA researchers not to be satisfied with a frequency explanation, but to interpret it—in short, to make sense of frequency.

The main purpose of this volume is to offer evidence of the contributions made by teachers, students, researchers, and administrators to classroom research and to the overall educational process. To this end, the editors explore four major themes: (a) research carried out by teachers and teacher educators of direct benefit to teachers; (b) professional development based on the analysis of diverse classroom phenomena; (c) collaboration of learners with teachers, teachers with teachers, and teachers with teacher educators; and (d) different language education contexts (research sites in seven countries on three continents), from which the editors seek common features in the traditional distinction between so-called foreign, second, and modern language education.

Ellis's target article suggests that language processing is based on frequency and probabilistic knowledge and that language learning is implicit. These findings are consistent with those of SLA researchers working within a variationist framework (e.g., Tarone, 1985; Bayley & Preston, 1996). This paper provides a brief overview of this research area, which has developed useful models for dealing with frequency effects in language use, and describes a psycholinguistic model of language variation currently being proposed by Preston (2000a, 2000b) that dovetails nicely with Ellis's proposals. The present commentary addresses the question “To what extent is the learner's interlanguage passively and unconsciously derived from input frequencies?” Ellis does state that factors other than frequency are also important for SLA—specifically, conscious noticing and social context. A related factor is the learner'screativity, revealed when learners' noticing leads them to view utterances not just as potential objects of analysis but as potential objects of language play. Noticing results in the selective internalization of language input in interactions with various L2 speakers, and creativity occurs in the learner's consequent production of any of a range of different voices thus internalized for the purposes of expressing social identity and of language play (Tarone 2000).

This book is a ten-chapter ethnolinguistic study of the language and social behavior of a group of 3-year-old third-generation British children schooled in the northeast of England. Their families are settled migrants who speak languages other than English at home and in their community. The study uses audiotaped recordings of the children's language, together with thick contextual description, to provide insights into ways in which young children learn to be communicatively competent in their new environment.

In this book, Slavin and Calderón demonstrate that school-age Hispanic students in the United States can realize their academic expectations and in the process become capable members of society when they are trained in quality educational programs. The authors' educational research expertise presents readers with a selection of recent studies of elementary and secondary instructional programs targeting Latino students. The book's 10 chapters advance a commanding body of performance data that illustrate how Latino students, like any other students, can be successfully educated and empowered and can even excel in an antagonistic American educational culture. The programs researched include numerous educational models specific to Hispanic students as well as adaptations of other national programs.

Charlene Sato, a noted scholar in SLA and creole studies, is honored by this text. Many chapters analyze Hawai‘ian Creole English (HCE), which Sato promoted as a living language, and it is in that spirit that the editors have included short stories in HCE.

This response addresses the following points raised in the commentaries: (a) complementary learning mechanisms, the distinction between explicit and implicit memory, and the neuroscience of “noticing”; (b) what must and what need not be noticed for learning; (c) when frequency fails to drive learning, which addresses factors such as failing to notice cues, perseveration, transfer from L1, developmental readiness, thinking too hard, pedagogical input, and practicing; (d) attention and form-focused instruction; (e) conscious and unconscious knowledge of frequency; (f) sequences of acquisition—from formula, through low-scope pattern, to construction; (g) the Fundamental Difference hypothesis; (h) the blind faith of categorical grammar; (i) Labovian variationist perspectives; (j) parsimony and theory testing; (k) universals and predispositions; and (l) wanna-contractions. It concludes by emphasizing that language acquisition is a process of dynamic emergence and that learners' language is a product of their history of usage in communicative interaction.