WASHBACK IN LANGUAGE TESTING: RESEARCH CONTEXTS AND METHODS. Liying Cheng, Yoshinori Watanabe, and Andy Curtis (Eds.). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum, 2004. Pp. xxi + 233. $27.50 paper.

Since Alderson and Wall (1993) posited a seemingly rhetorical question, “Does washback exist?” language testing professionals have directed attention to the impact of testing on teaching, learning, educational outcomes, and individuals. This edited volume is the culmination of language testing professionals' conscious efforts to better understand washback. It bears rich testimony to the complex nature of washback phenomena in every corner of educational systems. It is a useful resource for those seeking guidance on their own washback studies—for teachers and school administrators who are haunted by the power of tests and for those who need empirical evidence for and against test washback in specific testing situations.

The current study examined the comprehension and production of classifiers, case marking, and morphological passive structures among 414 child Japanese heritage speakers (mean age = 10.01 years; range = 4.02 – 18.18). Focusing on individual differences, we extracted latent experiential factors via the Q-BEx questionnaire (De Cat, Kašćelan, Prévost, Serratrice, Tuller, Unsworth, & The Q.-Be Consortium, 2022), which were then used to predict knowledge and use of these grammatical structures. The findings reveal that: (i) experiential factors such as heritage language (HL) engagement at home and within the community modulate grammatical performance differentially from childhood through adolescence, and (ii) HL proficiency, immersion experiences, and literacy systematically predict HL grammatical outcomes. These results indicate that particular language background factors hold differential significance at distinct developmental stages and that higher proficiency, richer immersion experiences, and literacy engagement in the HL are crucial for the development of core grammatical structures.

This study is a close replication of Kanwit and Geeslin (2014), a variationist investigation of the interpretation of verbal moods in adverbial clauses in Spanish. Whereas the first language (L1) of the second-language participants in the initial study was English, we explore whether Kanwit and Geeslin’s results extend to other L1 populations—Swedish and French learners of Spanish. Participants in the replication study completed the same interpretation task and grammar test as those in the initial study. Results showed, for example, that multiple factors influenced their variable interpretation of verbal moods, there was evidence of change between course levels, and there were certain differences in interpretation between the French and Swedish groups. This study contributes to knowledge about the interpretation of a variable structure by enhancing the confirmatory power of some of the initial study’s findings, while also suggesting that the learners’ L1 leads to diverging findings.

This study focused on the relative contributions of cognitive aptitudes to the incidental learning and automatization of mini-language grammar. Over three sessions, participants (N = 45; first language [L1] Polish; age range: 19–35) completed computerized training in MiniItaliano as well as tasks tapping into working memory, general intelligence, and language analytic ability (LAA). The overt aim of the training was to comprehend messages placed in the context of an Italian supermarket; however, its actual goal was to acquire the target syntactic rules (i.e., subject-verb agreement, gender agreement, word order). The final session included a surprise post-test with untimed and timed grammaticality judgment tasks (GJTs) as measures of explicit and automatized knowledge, respectively. Results showed that performance on both tasks was predicted by LAA over and above other cognitive and control measures. Additionally, scores on the untimed GJTs were related to reliance on (self-discovered) rules, while timed GJTs involved general IQ.

This paper reports a replication of part of Tavakoli and Foster’s (2008) investigation into the influence of narrative task design on second language (L2) oral performance. The initial study found in part that narratives with both foreground and background information elicited significantly greater syntactic complexity than those with only foreground information. This close replication adds the variable of literacy, conducting the study with adult refugees to New Zealand with low first language (L1) literacy. Participants narrated two of the four cartoon strips in Tavakoli and Foster (2008). In contrast to the initial study, background information in the narrative tasks had no impact on the syntactic complexity, lexical diversity, or fluency of performances. However, given the tendency of participants to omit background events, this outcome is discussed in terms of visual literacy, and aptness to describe rather than connect the cartoon frames. The implications for the use of narrative tasks with such learners are explored.

It goes without saying that longitudinal second language (L2) data have contributed—and will continue to contribute—much to L2 theory construction, yet one of the more difficult problems involved with this and similarly large-scale corpora is their very manageability. In years past, a common solution to this problem involved creating card catalogs for what appeared to be crucial parts of the data; more recently, researchers have resorted to computational resources, generally electronic databases. Nonetheless, these solutions remained strictly local: Access to such analytical means was generally restricted to the researchers involved. This situation is beginning to change, however, because, as this report will show, more child as well as adult L2 data are finding their way into the Child Language Data Exchange System (CHILDES) archive, thereby permitting widespread access to these data.

Applied linguistics embodies a kaleidoscope of disciplines, theoretical approaches, researchparadigms, and beliefs about practice. Its diversity is reflected in this festschrifthonoring Henry Widdowson. The volume contains the contributions of 27 authors from fivecontinents and, like the honoree's own body of work, represents a wide range of topics. Intheir introductory chapter, the editors outline the disciplines they have chosen to include:assessment, corpus linguistics, discourse analysis, language teaching, literature, second languageacquisition, and the relationship among theory, research, and practice. As this list reveals, otherareas of applied linguistics are notably absent: first language literacy, language planning andpolicy, and translation, among others. Omissions are no doubt necessary in order to compile avolume of manageable size; in spite of these omissions, readers will find the contributionsabsorbing and take pleasure in tracing thematic threads throughout. A sampling of major themesis outlined here.

The 13 essays of the present volume deal with how adults understand and how childrendevelop coherence and textual cohesion. The collection possesses unity because the editorsrequested that the contributors emphasize the clause-level and linguistic markers, that theypresent an overview of current research, and that they show how the acquisition of particularcohesive functions manifests general principles.

This is the seventh volume in the highly acclaimed “Sociolinguistics in Deaf Communities” series published by Gallaudet University Press. This volume is the first major attempt to document and analyze linguistic variation in American Sign Language (ASL). Based on seven years of research spread across the United States, including data collected from seven sites (Staunton, VA; Frederick, MD; Boston, MA; New Orleans, LA; Fremont, CA; Olathe, KS, and Kansas City, MO, together; and Bellingham, WA), Sociolinguistic variation in American Sign Language is a major contribution to the growing literature on the linguistics and sociolinguistics of ASL. It seeks to “provide a comprehensive description of the variables and constraints at work in sign language variation” (p. xv), building on the existing linguistic literature dealing with ASL. It succeeds admirably, if not in providing the final word on these complex issues, then by offering not only fascinating insights into sign language variation but also an empirical database that is unmatched in its depth and breadth in the field.