The study explores the psycholinguistic processes underlying L2 self-repair behavior bymeans of analyzing the timing of various types of self-corrections found in the speech of 30Hungarian speakers of English at three levels of proficiency (pre-intermediate,upper-intermediate, and advanced). The paper discusses the relevance of timing data for theexisting models of speech monitoring and examines how the level of proficiency of L2 learnersaffects the speed of error detection and the execution of correction. The results obtained indicatethat the perceptual loop theory and the activation spreading theory of monitoring both rightlyassume that monitoring involves the same mechanisms as speech comprehension. The analysis ofthe timing data reveals that corrections of pragmatically inappropriate lexical choice havedetection times very similar to those of lexical errors. This may be regarded as indirect evidencefor the claim that lexical entries in the mental lexicon also contain specifications concerning theirpragmatic value. The results show that the level of proficiency of the participants affects the timenecessary for the lexical, grammatical, and phonological encoding of the repair, which is causedby the difference in the degree of automaticity of these mechanisms at various stages of L2development.

This study considers the role of instruction, second language (L2) input, first language (L1)transfer, and Universal Grammar (UG) in the development of L2 morphosyntactic knowledge.Specifically, it investigates the acquisition of the Spanish morpheme se byEnglish-speaking adult learners. Participants included 91 university students and 30 Spanishnative-speaker controls. Learners received form-focused, communicative instruction onse for one week and were tested before, immediately following, and 24 days after thetreatment period. Assessment consisted of a grammaticality judgment task and two productiontasks using se in a variety of verb classes. The results showed that se hadbeen added to many learners' grammars, but also that L1-derived forms andovergeneralization errors had not been completely preempted. These findings are taken asevidence that the development of L2 grammars is affected by a number of independent, yetcooperating, knowledge sources, which thus supports a modular account of L2 acquisition.

Felix (1988) claimed to demonstrate that UG-based knowledge of grammaticality causesnonnative speakers (NNSs) to have more accurate grammaticality judgments on sentences thatare ungrammatical according to UG than on those that are grammatical. Birdsong (1994)criticized the methodology employed, noting that it ignores “response bias” (apropensity to judge sentences as ungrammatical) as a potential explanation. Felix and Zobl(1994) dismissed this criticism as merely methodological. In this paper, Birdsong'scriticism is upheld by considering a statistical model of the data. At the same time, a morecomplete logistic regression model allows a fuller statistical analysis, revealing tentative supportfor the asymmetry claim, as well as differential learning states for different constructions and atendency toward transfer avoidance. These theoretically significant effects were unnoticed in theearlier discussion of this research. For SLA research on grammaticality judgments to proceedfruitfully, appropriate statistical models need to be considered in designing the research.

This experimental study on English, Spanish, and Turkish as second languages investigatesthe interaction of universal principles and L1 knowledge in interlanguage grammars by focusingon verbs that participate in the causative/inchoative alternation (such as break inEnglish). These verbs have the same lexico-semantic composition, but differ crosslinguisticallyas to how they encode the alternation morphologically. Results of a picture judgment task showthat, as in L1 acquisition, L2 learners of Turkish, Spanish, and English with different L1s rely ona universal mechanism when learning transitivity alternations. L1 influence plays a prominentrole in the morphological realization of the alternation. These findings suggest that UG and L1knowledge may not affect all linguistic domains in the same way at a given stage ofdevelopment. It is proposed that transfer is subject to modularity in interlanguage grammars.

Most of the contents of this book were published separately but have been substantiallyrevised and updated for this volume. Although the book is primarily intended for languageteachers and researchers, the publisher recommends it also to undergraduate and postgraduatestudents. For that purpose, attractive and probably effective discussion questions and activitieshave been added to each chapter.

Rod Ellis's latest offering addresses issues relating to the interface between SLAresearch and language pedagogy. To this end, the book opens with an informative andthought-provoking examination of applied SLA (research simultaneously encompassing thetheory and practice of SLA and pedagogy), which, following Widdowson, Ellis distinguishesfrom SLA applied (extension of SLA findings to teaching). In this regard he discusses thedifference between technical knowledge and “confirmatory,” often experimental,research on the one hand, and practical knowledge and “interpretative,” real world,observation-interactional research on the other. According to Ellis, the confirmatory tradition,which promotes an applied science (i.e., SLA applied) view of education, has been the dominantparadigm in the field. This tradition situates researchers at the top of the research-practicehierarchy as producers of information and locates teachers lower down on the hierarchy asinformation consumers.

During the past decade, John Schumann and his colleagues at UCLA have been pursuing anovel line of research by examining SLA from a neurobiological perspective. Several articleshave reported on various phases of this extended program and now The neurobiology ofaffect in language offers a comprehensive summary of Schumann's theory. Assuggested by the title, affect in this book is seen as central to the understanding ofSLA. This is because, as the author argues, SLA is emotionally driven and emotion underliesmost, if not all, cognition.

This recent volume in the Benjamins series Language Acquisition & LanguageDisorders is likely to find a wide, international readership among participants in courses onSLA theory as well as among seasoned scholars in the field. As the volume underscores,phonology per se has not been given the extensive attention in second language research andteaching that syntax has experienced, and, for its title alone, the book would be a welcomeaddition to the literature.

This collection of ten articles constitutes the fourth volume of a series, Sociolinguisticsin Deaf Communities. The book's title refers to an aspect of variation in signlanguages (pinky extension) and an aspect of sign language discourse (eye gaze) and underscoresthe richness and uniqueness of language use in Deaf communities around the world. The tenarticles are distributed among the book's six sections: variation, languages in contact,language in education, discourse analysis, second language learning, and language attitudes.,Although most of the articles focus on American Sign Language (ASL), one article exploresgrammatical constraints on fingerspelled English verb loans in British Sign Language, anotherexamines the representation of character signs in Taiwan Sign Language (TSL) resulting fromcontact between TSL and written Chinese, and a third outlines historical, political, andeducational issues affecting Irish Sign Language and the Irish Deaf community. Thebook's coverage of diverse sign language communities is enhanced by an article exploringvariation in the use of “tactile ASL” by Deaf-Blind people, in which case alanguage ordinarily processed in a visual modality is communicated through touch.

As a result of large-scale migrations from the less developed to the more developedcountries, the multilingual, multicultural school is becoming a reality, not only in cities withtraditionally large immigrant populations such as New York, Los Angeles, and Toronto, butthroughout North America and Western Europe. Indeed, the 1990 U.S. Census shows that one inevery seven children between the ages of 5 and 17 comes from a home where a language otherthan English is spoken. These major demographic changes have left many teachers and otherschool personnel unprepared to deal with the new realities of the multilingual, multiculturalclassroom. Edwards' brief volume is directed to mainstream classroom teachers who, ifcurrent trends continue as expected, will spend much of their careers in even more linguisticallyand culturally diverse schools than exist currently. Edwards' intent is to counterwidespread myths about second language learning and bilingualism, and to assist teachersmaximizing the rich educational resource that the multicultural, multilingual schoolrepresents.

Simultaneously theoretical and data-rich, this volume explores ways in which ethnicminorities grapple with conflicts related to the literacy practices of their home culture as well asthose practices demanded by the dominant culture. Truly multicultural in nature, the book offersin-depth glimpses into a variety of teaching and learning contexts: how young Gujarati teenagersin England learn Gujarati (chapter 3), how Hmong parents wish their children to retain fluency inKhmer while also insisting that they attend “English only” schools (chapter 4),how Finns in Sweden and Karelias in Russia grapple with the literacy demands of the majorityculture (chapter 1), how “usefulness” becomes the most crucial variable indetermining the language of schooling in bi- and multilingual contexts (chapter 2), and howVietnamese people wrestle with learning their mother tongue in Norway (chapter 8).

This volume consists of a collection of 13 papers from the 23rd International L.A.U.D.conference on “The Cultural Context in Communication Across Languages” held atthe University of Duisburg, Germany, in March, 1997. The conference was concerned with twodifferent aspects of cross-cultural communication: business communication and the culturaldimension of foreign language teaching. The papers dealing with this second aspect are collectedin the present volume.

The phenomenon of styleswitching has been important in the study of L1 and L2 languageuse. Labov's early studies correlated formal style with attention paid to speech, a notionechoed in Krashen's monitor model. Giles' accommodation theory and Bell'saudience design theory claim that speakers styleswitch in order to accommodate to the speech oftheir audience. Several SLA scholars have found evidence for accommodation in L2 speech aswell. Such correlational studies have been criticized for lacking a clear foundation in cognitivetheory. In this volume Myers-Scotton describes her Markedness Model (MM), which groundsstyleswitching (including codeswitching) in the cognitive theory of somatic markers (Damasio,1994). Because speech styles are distinguished mainly by the frequency at which certain features(such as dropping a consonant from a cluster) appear, variationists have sought to identify acognitive mechanism that could account for the apparent fine-tuning of feature frequencies.However, it is not clear from the discussion in this volume whether the somatic markerhypothesis provides such a mechanism.

The goal of this volume is to provide a rich, interdisciplinary foundation of empirical studiesdescribing the discourse of Language Proficiency Interviews (LPIs), focusing on“interactional competence.” The studies not only show how difficult it is to validlyassess oral proficiency; they also show that discourse analysis of LPIs—as the editors pointout—is very much in its infancy. Most of these studies face research design challenges(e.g., small sample size, sample comparability, coding reliability, or a combination of these), yetthey illustrate the potential contributions of various (mostly qualitative) discourse analyticapproaches to an understanding and assessment of oral proficiency.

According to the editors of this volume, models and theories of linguistic analysis that arebased on a study of monolingual societies are no longer appropriate for our contemporary world.Fueled by an interest in examining “multilingual and pluricultural societies wherelearning more than one language and accommodating multiple identities is a way of life”(p. 17), they have collected 11 papers as well as an introductory essay that analyze secondlanguage learning in a range of interesting multicultural settings. For example, there are paperson the acquisition of Hindi by Tamils in Delhi, English and German by Indian undergraduates atthe University of Delhi, and English by immigrants from six different countries in Britain.

From time to time, the annual Language Testing Research Colloquium (LTRC) publishes itspapers. Kunnan, his contributors, and Erlbaum are to be commended for a rich, well edited, andthematically unified offering. Some wise decisions were made: author-provided abstracts,references following each paper, author-provided annotated bibliographies, and a rich index. Thisis more than a collection of conference papers. It is a book in its own right with the potential tobecome a textbook on language test validation.

In his introduction, Campbell makes a case for the broader relevance of historical linguisticsby noting that observing what does and does not change in language contributes to “theunderstanding of universal grammar, language typology, and human cognition in general”(p. 2). The generativist perspective that phonological and syntactic changes are linked tolanguage acquisition, cited on page 236, illustrates one interface between historical linguisticsand general linguistic theory.

As indicated by the title of this volume, this collection of public speeches, conferencepresentations, and practical tips for the elementary foreign language classroom truly celebratesthe vibrancy and mission exhibited by many teachers of foreign languages at the elementarylevel. The designation FLES* (pronounced “flestar”) has been created by Liptonas an “overall term for all types of elementary school foreign language programs”(p. 1), including sequential FLES (Foreign Language in the Elementary School), FLEX (ForeignLanguage Exploratory), and Immersion. According to Lipton, the term “sequentialFLES” subsumes the model usually referred to as FLES.

Tense and aspect is grounded in Gustave Guillaume's notion of“chronogenesis,” the staged development of a complex time image. Within thisframework, the historical development of the tense and aspect systems of all branches ofIndo-European is analyzed with clarity, demonstrating their divergence from a common model.The approach is based on the notions of Descending (moving-world) versus Ascending(moving-ego) Time, with ω-moments as memory and α-moments as imagination. Theposition of consciousness in relation to these moments is essential for characterizing aspect.