RESPONSE TO STUDENT WRITING: IMPLICATIONS FOR SECOND LANGUAGE STUDENTS. Dana Ferris. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum, 2003. Pp. xvi + 194. $45.00 cloth, $22.50 paper.

This volume by Ferris will attract the attention of second language (L2) teachers, particularly those who teach writing classes. The book is divided into two sections. Part 1 reviews research into response given to L2 writers, and part 2 examines the practical issues of responding to student writing. Although the title of the book refers to “second language students,” the focus is on students learning English as a second language (ESL). In fact, most of the research into response has been conducted with the ESL student population at the college level. That being said, this volume would certainly be an excellent supplemental text to assign for a teaching of ESL class in teaching writing or for in-service training. It is also a useful guide for L2 teachers who must decide how to respond to student writing.

APPRAISING RESEARCH IN SECOND LANGUAGE LEARNING: A PRACTICAL APPROACH TO CRITICAL ANALYSIS OF QUANTITATIVE RESEARCH. Graeme Keith Porte. Amsterdam: Benjamins, 2002. Pp. xx + 268. $78.00 cloth, $29.95 paper.

The author states in the preface that this book is intended “to guide student and novice researchers through their critical reading of a research paper in the field of second language learning” (p. ix). It does an admirable job of this and, in fact, should be required reading for every language researcher. Porte emphasizes that the role of the book is not to guide readers toward critical judgments of research articles but rather to constructive reading as consumers of research—which may, in turn, lead to well-designed and presented research studies of their own. To meet these goals, Porte divides the book into two parts: the first portion of the text, the textbook (pp. 3–149), guides readers through analyses of the various components of research studies, and the second portion, the workbook (pp. 153–246), leads readers through a detailed analysis of two sample studies.

LANGUAGE, COGNITION, AND THE BRAIN: INSIGHTS FROM SIGN LANGUAGE RESEARCH. Karen Emmorey. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum, 2002. Pp. xvii + 383. $99.95 cloth, $49.95 paper.

In the preface, Emmorey states her goal for this book: to illustrate what can be learned about human language, cognition, and the brain by studying signed languages and the deaf people who use them. She clearly achieves that goal in this excellent volume. Her scholarship is impeccable, something we have come to expect from this author. First of all, the organization of the book is impressive. Each chapter explicitly presents specific goals and then proceeds through those goals in an organized and clear style. The conclusion of each chapter includes suggested readings with a brief explanation of how these suggestions support the chapter. Second, this volume includes research on a variety of signed languages—Nicaraguan, Australian, Danish, and Irish, to name a few—and provides a truly comprehensive approach to the topic.

PHONOLOGY AND LANGUAGE USE. Joan Bybee. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Pp. xviii + 237. $80.00 cloth, $32.00 paper.

Bybee is concerned with providing an understanding of a vast amount of evidence from language use that remains unaccounted for in the usual models of generative phonology, including its currently popular descendant, Optimality Theory.

THE COGNITIVE SCIENCES: AN INTERDISCIPLINARY APPROACH. Carolyn P. Sobel. Mountain View, CA: Mayfield, 2001. Pp. xx + 327. $101.00 cloth.

As suggested by its subtitle, this volume looks at issues in cognitive science from varying perspectives, given in the five parts to the book: psychology, neuroscience, linguistics, artificial intelligence, and philosophy. Each part contains two chapters, the first of which reviews the development of the field as well as basic issues, and the second of which introduces some specific topics of current interest. The more specific topics include, among others: in psychology, propositional networks, mental imagery, problem solving, and memory; in neuroscience, functional and structural brain-mapping techniques; in linguistics, first and second language acquisition (covered in a total of 7–8 pages), aphasia, machine translation, and natural language processing by computer; in artificial intelligence, expert systems, connectionism, and robotics; and, in philosophy, the mind-body problem, free will, and consciousness.

QUESTIONNAIRES IN SECOND LANGUAGE RESEARCH: CONSTRUCTION, ADMINISTRATION, AND PROCESSING. Zoltán Dörnyei. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum, 2003. Pp. viii + 156. $37.50 cloth, $22.50 paper.

In the introduction to this volume, Dörnyei suggests that, although questionnaires are frequently employed by second language researchers, “there does not seem to be sufficient awareness in the profession about the theory of questionnaire design and processing” (p. 1). Looking to the various branches of research in the social sciences, such as psychometrics, social psychology, and sociology, Dörnyei notes that many of the questionnaires in second language research fail to meet the standards for reliability and validity because the researchers are apparently unfamiliar with the principles of questionnaire construction, administration, and processing. This book is intended to be a practical, easily understood guide for researchers to use when working with self-administered pencil-and-paper questionnaires. It achieves this aim.

RUSSIAN: A LINGUISTIC INTRODUCTION. Paul Cubberley. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Pp. xvi + 380. $70.00 cloth, $25.00 paper.

The author intended this book to be an “overall linguistic view of the [Russian] language” that would “provide the understanding of its structure which is essential for potential teachers and specialist users” (p. 9). His attempt to write a work that would appeal to students and teachers of Russian as well as to linguists was successful. The latter will appreciate Cubberley's thorough description of the language; in addition to the standard chapters on phonology, morphology, and word formation, there are detailed sections on the history of Russian (from Indo-European to the present), syntax (often included as part of morphology in descriptions of Russian), Russian dialects, and sociolinguistics (including current trends and predictions for future developments). For those who do not know Russian, all examples are transliterated and glossed. This book will interest any specialist looking for a solid one-volume introduction to Russian.

WORLD LEXICON OF GRAMMATICALIZATION. Bernd Heine and Tonia Kuteva. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Pp. xii + 387. $75.00 cloth, $28.00 paper.

The aim of this work is to provide the reader with access to the great variety of data that has emerged in the area of grammaticalization over the past 30 years. It presents data from diverse language families, providing examples of 400 processes from 500 languages. In their introduction, the authors lay out a classical definition of grammaticalization and discuss inherent problems and conventions chosen to best present the data. The second section provides a list of grammatical terms adopted with definitions and clarifies differences of usage.

TURN-TAKING, FINGERSPELLING, AND CONTACT IN SIGNED LANGUAGES. Ceil Lucas (Ed.). Washington, DC: Gallaudet University Press, 2002. Pp. ix + 163. $55.00 cloth.

The Sociolinguistics in Deaf Communities series published by Gallaudet University Press is, first and foremost, the leading collection of published work dealing explicitly with sociolinguistic issues in Deaf communities around the world. It is also more than this, however. Arguably, the series constitutes the foundation of one of the most exciting and promising areas of contemporary sociolinguistic research writ large. There can be little question that much of the very best work in sociolinguistics in the United States today is being done on issues related to sign language and the Deaf, and this series has provided us with a remarkable number of significant contributions to the general sociolinguistic literature. This volume edited by Ceil Lucas is the most recent publication in this series, and it carries on the impressive tradition of the earlier works in the series.

ETHICAL ISSUES FOR ESL FACULTY: SOCIAL JUSTICE IN PRACTICE. Johnnie J. Hafernik, Dorothy S. Messerschmitt, and S. Vandrick. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum, 2002. Pp. xv + 166. $45.00 cloth, $21.50 paper.

This volume brings together an inventory of problematic situations faced by English as a second language (ESL) faculty in postsecondary institutions, each problem loosely categorized in terms of whether it occurs as teachers fulfill their responsibilities in the classroom, outside the classroom within the institution, or in broader areas beyond the classroom and the institution. The ethical issue presented by each case is described, and general principles and pedagogical strategies that may be followed in responding to it are outlined.

L'ACQUISITION DES CATÉGORIES FONCTIONNELLES: ÉTUDE COMPARATIVE DU DÉVELOPPEMENT DU DP FRANÇAIS CHEZ DES ENFANTS ET DES APPRENANTS ADULTES [THE ACQUISITION OF FUNCTIONAL CATEGORIES: COMPARATIVE STUDY OF THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE FRENCH DP IN CHILDREN AND ADULT LEARNERS]. Jonas Granfeldt. Lund: Institute d'Études Romanes de Lund, Université de Lund, 2003. Pp. 268.

This doctoral dissertation constitutes an excellent example of how linguistic theory can contribute to the formulation of testable hypotheses about the nature of language acquisition. Taking as a point of departure Chomsky's Principles and Parameters model and the Minimalist Program, the author carries out a careful and detailed analysis of the status and development of the Determiner Phrase (DP) in two different sets of data: (a) bilingual (French-Swedish) first language (L1) developmental data produced by three children, and (b) second language (L2) French developmental data produced by eight Swedish adult speakers.

CHINESE CHILDREN'S READING ACQUISITION: THEORETICAL AND PEDAGOGICAL ISSUES. Wenling Li, Janet S. Gaffney, and Jerome L. Packard (Eds.). Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2002. Pp. xi + 266. $135.00 cloth.

This collaborative exploration by researchers in China and the United States spans theoretical, experimental, pedagogical, and ethnographic perspectives. The book thus offers learning opportunities to a range of audiences—reading researchers who want a better understanding of the structure of Chinese writing and the cognitive processes it appears to shape, students who wish to study how one-fifth of the world population reads, educators interested in comparative education, and all those with interdisciplinary curiosity about this nonalphabetic script, evolved from ancient times.

Publications received.