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 was organized on the Bloomington campus of Indiana University to celebrate the 20th anniversary of SSLA's founding. Presentations on the past, present, and future state of research on second language acquisition were presented by Editorial Board and Advisory Committee members Susan Gass, John Schumann, Kathleen Bardovi-Harlig, and Patsy Lightbown. 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 the fledgling publication that was SSLA in 1978, the journal would never have made it beyond the drawing board. In this note prefacing the last issue of Volume 20, I would like to narrate the conditions of SSLA's birth and comment on the journal's contribution to second language acquisition research.

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

This study investigates children's changing sensitivity to processing cues for identifying agent (word order, case marking, and animacy) as a function of proficiency in a second language. English-speaking learners of Japanese need to appropriately adjust cue strengths in moving from a rigid SVO language to one in which SOV word order is a good general processing strategy, but case marking must ultimately be relied on if it conflicts with this order. English-speaking children in grades K–7 in an immersion school were asked to identify the agent for a set of audiotaped sentences in English and Japanese. The children in this study learned to use SOV word order, lexical semantics, and canonical case marking, but they do not provide evidence of appropriately exploiting noncanonical case marking. We suggest that these results might be accounted for by the context in which input is processed in immersion school classrooms.

This study investigated the acquisition of the comprehension of overt morphological case marking by adult native speakers of English who were learning Russian or German as a second language (L2). The Russian case-marking system is more complex than the German system, but it almost always provides the listener with case inflections that are reliable cues to sentence interpretation. Two approaches to learning of inflectional morphology were contrasted: the rule-based approach, which predicts that learning is determined by paradigm complexity; and the associative approach, which predicts that learning is determined by the cue validity of individual inflections. A computerized picture-choice task probed the comprehension of L2 learners by varying the cues of case marking, noun configuration, and noun animacy. The results demonstrated that learners of Russian use case marking much earlier than learners of German and 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 was developed that correctly simulated the obtained results. Together, these findings support the view that 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-Based Evaluation in Second Language Education? First, the word “evaluation.” These days “evaluation” is so commonly attached collocationally to programs and projects 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 individual achievement 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 of introductory texts designed to be used as main or supporting resources in academic courses on pragmatics. 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 second language teaching, Diane Musumeci observes that in the often contentious discussions about this relationship “the one point on which almost everyone agrees is that scant evidence exists to support any single, unified theory of language learning” (p. 3). In Breaking Tradition: An Exploration of the Historical Relationship Between Theory and Practice in Second Language Teaching, Musumeci convincingly argues that the claim that there has been no consistent theory of second language teaching is not only ahistorical but has also discouraged critical investigation of the ideas of tradition and innovation in the field.

Savignon writes in her book, Communicative Competence Theory and Classroom Practice: Texts and Contexts in Second Language Learning (2nd ed.), that the communicative approach to language teaching has become so popular that many materials developers have jumped on the bandwagon, claiming a communicative focus to their materials. She writes, “What ‘nutritious’ and ‘natural’ are today to breakfast foods, ‘communicative’ and ‘functional’ are to language texts. How much change has actually taken place is debatable. Just as cereals containing ‘all natural’ honey are no less sweet, so ‘asking questions’ may be no 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 the International Association for the Study of Child Language held in Trieste in 1993. They cover a wide range of languages, including Swedish, Italian, German, Spanish, a group of Bantu languages, 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 papers can be mined by SLA researchers, I will mention five papers that might be of particular interest.

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