This multifaceted mosaic of vocabulary acquisition should be in every languageprofessional's library, nudging us to look beyond size of vocabulary and toward a betterunderstanding of what Meara (1996) has called its cognitive “organisation.”

I am writing this review approximately three months before voters go to the polls inCalifornia to decide the fate of Proposition 227, the English for Children Initiative (otherwiseknown as the Unz Initiative). Whatever the outcome, the fate of bilingual education in California(and, as a consequence, across the United States) will be profoundly affected. Mr. Unz, whoopposes bilingual education, is described in a page one article in the New York Times(March 10, 1988) as a person who has no “background in education,” “hasnever set foot in a bilingual education class,” and “puts no credence in any of theresearch on either side of the (bilingual) debate.” Brisk, the author of the book underreview here, is a proponent of quality bilingual education and draws upon her personalexperiences as an educator as well as an enormous body of research and literature to help definethe characteristics of effective bilingual programs. She forcefully argues that: “Our societyseems to be unable to differentiate between choice of a national language and choice of alanguage for education,” (p. 31) and she challenges bilingual education'sopponents, who she says “in effect would postpone quality education until students masterEnglish” (p. 2).

In the book Computer-assisted language learning: Context and conceptualization,Levy sets out in the preface to (a) “circumscribe Computer-Assisted Language Learning[CALL] for the purpose of teaching it” (p. xi), (b) build on previous workrather than being led by technological innovation, and (c) “understand better therelationship between theory and application” (p. xi). Two hundred thirty-two pages later(plus 66 pages of appendices and references), it is clear that the book delivers its promise. Theauthor bases the book on previous work and addresses a perpetual problem inCALL—reinventing the wheel. Moreover, Levy links the history of CALL with thepresent and combines a very thorough literature review with survey data about CALL materialsdevelopment.

This paper is in answer to Ellis's (1994) call for more research about vocabularyacquisition from oral input in four areas. It is a hypothesis-generating study of nine advanceduniversity EFL learners' incidental vocabulary acquisition from oral and written dialoguejournals over a semester's time. All teacher and student entries in the two types of journalswere transcribed and analyzed using WordCruncher (1993). The analyses compare thecharacteristics of the input to the learners in the two modes as well as quantitative and qualitativeevidence of vocabulary acquisition by the learners from the two modes. Findings of this studyindicate several specific places (14 statements) where further research could be undertaken. Thesefit in three of the areas Ellis named for exploration: (a) “the nature of the input,”(b) “the role of interaction,” and (c) “individual learner factors” (p.1). The findings suggest measures that can be used for quantitative and qualitative evidence ofvocabulary acquisition from natural sources

This published version of Markham's dissertation surveys the literature on secondlanguage phonetics (but not phonology), proposes two models, and presents experimentsinvolving imitation of languages and dialects.

This book, which is one of a series of papers from the University of Duisburg, is ajustification of the visual elements of a particular computer-assisted language learning programfor learning Dutch called EuroLex. About one third of the book is a description of the EuroLexprogram. Because of this, it suffers from the seemingly unavoidable problem that many accountsof CALL programs face, and that is the need for elaborate step-by-step description of theoperation of the program when five minutes working with the actual program would conveymore information more effectively.

These two volumes contain a selection of 19 papers presented at the Penn State Conferenceon the Acquisition of Spanish as a First or Second language held in October 1995.

This article reports an experimental study of the differential effects ofpremodified input, interactionally modified input, and modified output on the comprehension ofdirections in a listen-and-do task and the acquisition of new words embedded in the directions.The modified output group achieved higher comprehension and vocabulary acquisition scoresthan either of the input groups. There was no difference between the premodified andinteractionally modified input groups. The advantage of the modified output group is explainedin terms of the qualitatively superior dialogic interaction that occurred in this condition ratherthan in terms of actual language production.

A fattish edited volume on SLA based on a Dutch summer course held in 1991, the book isdivided into eight chapters, each containing between one and three contributions by experts invarious specialized areas. These chapters are headed as follows:

Progress toward establishing a model of lexical development to guide vocabulary acquisitionresearch requires more precise specification of the various dimensions of lexical competence, theinterrelationships among them, and how they interface with processes of word learning and use.Three dimensions of lexical competence are proposed: (a) partial to precise knowledge, (b) depthof knowledge, and (c) receptive to productive use ability. The relationship between the twoknowledge dimensions and the acquisition of word meaning is considered, with emphasis on thecomplexity of the semantization1 process and on the need for redefining lexicaldevelopment as both item-learning and system-changing. The adequacy of the three-dimensionaldescription as a reflection of the process of vocabulary development is then discussed.Consideration of the nature of the developmental interrelationships among the dimensions raisestwo further questions: (a) Is depth of knowledge a prerequisite for developing precisecomprehension? and (b) Are precise knowledge and depth of knowledge prerequisites for a wordto become productive?

From reader to reading teacher: Issues and strategies for second languageclassrooms is a book targeted at second language teachers in training. The first twochapters provide a brief overview of theory and research in second language reading. Chapter 3treats course design; 4, prereading activities; 5, activities during reading; 6, postreadingactivities; 7, vocabulary; 8, the use of literature; 9, assessment; 10, lesson planning; and 11,teacher development. In other words, the book attempts a comprehensive treatment of importantissues related to reading instruction in second language contexts.

The last thirty years have witnessed considerable research in the fields of second languageacquisition (SLA) and second language teaching (SLT). However, most of this research has beenconcerned with second languages such as English, Spanish, French, and German. There has beencomparatively little research on the less commonly taught second languages such as Hindi andother South Asian languages. As the editor states in the preface, enrollment in courses on SouthAsian languages has rapidly grown in universities in the United States and there is an urgent needfor a careful examination of the issues relevant to the teaching and learning of these languages.The purpose of the book is to fill the existing gap and to generate an interest among bothresearchers and practitioners in the teaching and learning of South Asian languages.

Communication Strategies: Psycholinguistic and Sociolinguistic Perspectives isnot simply an update of the 1983 Strategies in Interlanguage Communication(Færch & Kasper). This volume goes beyond the earlier concerns of definition,identification, and classification of communication strategies to considerations of differenttheoretical and analytical perspectives, research methodologies, and the role of cultural andlinguistic backgrounds.

Second language speech: Structure and process is a collection of current researchon SLA phonology. The papers in this book vary widely in scope and theoretical stance, but arecurrent theme is that research in second language phonology can shed light on other areas ofSLA research. Summarized here are those papers that represent mainstream SLA phonologyresearch, as well as papers that have particular relevance to other areas of SLA research.

This book is a first attempt to bring together a collection of state-of-the-art studies of variouslines of research on language processing in Spanish, ranging from speech perception to sentenceproduction.

This paper takes the papers in this special collection as a starting point and raises issuesconcerning key terms, with particular emphasis on incidental. It is argued that there isno clear way to show that a word has been learned incidentally, if one means that specificattention is not drawn to that word either by some external force or by the learner. I further arguethat, to understand vocabulary learning, linguists cannot limit the investigation to word meaning.Essential to a study of the lexicon is the study of syntax—in particular, the incorporation ofsyntactic subcategorizations. Taking all of these factors into account, a more nuanced approach tothe study of incidental vocabulary learning is needed.

In this dissertation based on empirical studies conducted by the author and reprinted as aseries of articles in the text, Kuure studies the development of different types of bilingualism.The primary purpose of the studies is to determine the significance of age in the acquisition of asecond language. Evidence is also provided for describing the acquisition and use of languages invarious multicultural and multilingual settings. Data for the studies were obtained fromFinnish-Swedish bilingual students between the ages of 13 and 15 for whom Swedish was thesecond language.

This volume, the third in the Studies in Bilingualism series from the EuropeanScience Foundation's research on adult immigrants' L2 acquisition, begins with theobservation that we have widely accepted the idea that learners' varieties and thetransitions from one variety to the next are systematic, yet we have little research that records thissystematicity. This study does exactly that by following for 30 months 10 L2 learners'developing linguistic means for indicating spatial relations. Carroll reports on two Italianspeakers acquiring English; Becker on four Italian speakers and a Turkish speaker acquiringGerman; and Giacobbe, Perdue, and Porquier on two Spanish speakers and a Moroccan Arabicspeaker acquiring French. To elicit the core data, the researchers asked the learners to describepictures and to provide stage directions for a scene they had viewed to someone who had notseen it.

In this revised dissertation, Robinson tackles two important topics in adult second languagelearning: (a) the roles of attention and awareness and (b) the mechanisms for storage of secondlanguage knowledge.

This book contains 11 papers on the computational extraction of lexical structure from textinput and text search: That is what is meant here by lexical acquisition. Theintroduction sets out the prospects for automatic lexical acquisition and is followed by threepapers on proper name identification and categorization. These offer different computationalsolutions to the quandaries proper names pose for delimitation, classification, standardization,and discourse reference. For example, where is the person in Federal Reserve ChairmanAlan Greenspan and how should this to be linked to Fed Chief? The advance inthese papers is their attempt to solve proper naming via text structure alone, which makes thesystems more savvy than brute look-up programs.