RAISING BILINGUAL-BILITERATE CHILDREN IN MONOLINGUAL CULTURES.Stephen J. Caldas. Clevedon, UK: Multilingual Matters, 2006. Pp. xvi + 231. $39.95 paper.

Caldas's work tells the story of his three children's language development over the course of 19 years. Caldas is a native English speaker from Louisiana and a fluent but nonnative speaker of French. Caldas's wife hails from Quebec and is a native French speaker, also fluent in English. Their three children—a boy and twin girls who were born 2 years later—were raised in suburban Louisiana with extended French-immersion vacations in Quebec. Caldas and his wife attempt to make their home a French-only environment by adopting a family language policy of speaking only French themselves and by promoting French-language books, television, and media. Whereas they are successful throughout the children's early years, their project meets resistance when their eldest boy reaches about 10 and begins to reject everything French. The younger girls soon follow in his footsteps. With patience, perseverance, and regular extended visits to French-speaking Quebec, this phase passes, and by the volume's happy ending, all three children become bilingual and biliterate teens (and presumably adults).

THE COGNITIVE NEUROSCIENCE OF SECOND LANGUAGE ACQUISITION.Marianne Gullberg and Peter Indefrey (Eds.). Oxford: Blackwell, 2006. Pp. v + 348. $39.95 paper.

This edited collection consists of a selection of conference papers that deal with the brain and SLA. The areas of focus are age and proficiency levels related to the critical period issue, ultimate attainment, and the regulation of two languages in a brain. The main chapters review the evidence in these areas and are each followed by a critical commentary.

BRIDGING DISCOURSES IN THE ESL CLASSROOM: STUDENTS, TEACHERS, AND RESEARCHERS.Pauline Gibbons. New York: Continuum, 2006. Pp. 256. $60.00 paper.

In English-speaking countries with large numbers of immigrants, like the United States and Australia, children from non-English-speaking families are very likely to encounter difficulties in learning English and content knowledge simultaneously. In particular, one of the greatest challenges for English as a second language (ESL) children lies in their tendency to use everyday language (i.e., language acquired in informal situations, such as playing) in academic settings. Gibbons' work presents a research project that examines real-life content-based classroom interactions in which ESL children's English and content knowledge learning are facilitated. It makes an invaluable contribution to the effort to help ESL learners make a successful transition from everyday informal language to specialized academic registers.

CALLING ON CALL: FROM THEORY AND RESEARCH TO NEW DIRECTIONS IN FOREIGN LANGUAGE TEACHING.Lara Ducate and Nike Arnold (Eds.). San Marcos, TX: Calico, 2006. Pp. 351. $24.95 paper.

So far, language educators and researchers have proposed quite a few theoretical conceptualizations of the potential of technology in language education and have conducted empirical studies exploring the affordance and constraints of technology in language education. The large number and variety of publications on this topic is informative but might also be overwhelming to language teachers, and many teachers are at a loss as to how exactly to incorporate technologies into their daily practice despite being intrigued by all of these claims and findings on the promise of technology. This volume, edited by Ducate and Arnold, provides timely support to language teachers. This practice-oriented volume not only gives language teachers broad perspectives on the status quo of computer-assisted language learning (CALL) but also provides specific guidelines on how to incorporate technologies in specific language teaching areas.

EDUCATING FOR ADVANCED FOREIGN LANGUAGE CAPACITIES: CONSTRUCTS, CURRICULUM, INSTRUCTION, ASSESSMENT.Heidi Byrnes, Heather D. Weger-Guntharp, and Katherine Sprang (Eds.). Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2007. Pp. x + 208. $44.95 paper.

The contents of this volume are drawn from papers presented at the 2005 Georgetown University Round Table on Languages and Linguistics (GURT), the theme of which was educating for advanced language proficiency. In her introduction, Byrnes notes that despite the obvious need for advanced foreign language capacities and the clear limitations of current instructional practices, the advanced learner is often overlooked in SLA theory and research and continues to receive inadequate pedagogical attention. To help rectify this situation, the conference conveners brought together leading cognitive linguistic, systemic-functional, and sociocultural researchers in order to “specify the construct of advancedness in theory and research and for laying out broad parameters for curriculum, instruction, and assessment in support of the acquisition of advanced levels of L2 ability” (p. 3). Each of the 12 chapters is provocative, and the volume, overall, is of excellent quality. Researchers and educators alike will find this work profoundly useful.

TEACHING THE DIMENSIONS OF LITERACY.Stephen B. Kucer and Cecilia Silva. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum, 2006. Pp. xv + 406. $49.95 paper.

Kucer and Silva's work is a companion volume to Kucer's (2005) earlier volume, Dimensions of Literacy: A Conceptual Base for Teaching Reading and Writing In School Settings, now in its second edition. In this earlier volume, Kucer argued that literacy should be understood in all its dimensions—cognitive, linguistic, sociocultural, and developmental—and that to reduce our understanding of literacy to any one dimension alone is to lack wisdom about its total nature. Whereas the previous volume offers a theoretical exposition of these four dimensions of literacy (i.e., content knowledge for teachers), this new work provides answers to the question “Well, now that I am equipped with a multidimensional understanding of literacy, what shall I do on Monday morning?” (i.e., pedagogical content knowledge; Shulman, 1986).

ACQUIRING A NON-NATIVE PHONOLOGY: LINGUISTIC CONSTRAINTS AND SOCIAL BARRIERS.Jette G. Hansen. New York: Continuum, 2006. Pp. 197. $160.00 cloth.

Hansen's monograph concerns the phonological development of two Vietnamese adults acquiring English as a second language (L2). Data collection began 1 year after the couple's immigration to the United States and continued for a period of 1 year. The focus was on the developmental sequences involved in the acquisition of English syllable-initial and syllable-final consonant singletons and clusters, which are challenges to many L2 learners. In Vietnamese, syllable-final phones are limited to plosives, nasals, and semivowels; there are no consonant clusters.

THEORIES IN SECOND LANGUAGE ACQUISITION: AN INTRODUCTION.Bill VanPatten and Jessica Williams (Eds.). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum, 2007. Pp. xiv + 261. $32.50 paper.

This volume consists of chapters contributed by a group of SLA experts whose work has had a significant influence on the field of contemporary SLA research. Its goal is to provide readers with accessible synopses of various approaches to the study of later language development. Twelve chapters define language either as a computational system that exists beyond general human cognition or as a dynamic system that links the two inextricably. All of them nonetheless presuppose that adult SLA is distinct in that its initial state is constitutive of a completed grammatical system. Each chapter, except for the introduction and the conclusion, follows the same format: introduction of the theory or approach, verification of its validity, discussion of its limitations, an illustrative study, and discussion of the theory's relevance to some of the SLA issues identified by VanPatten and Williams in the introduction. Each chapter ends with discussion questions and further suggested reading.

INQUIRIES IN LINGUISTIC DEVELOPMENT: IN HONOR OF LYDIA WHITE.Roumyana Slabakova, Silvina A. Montrul, and Philippe Prévost (Eds.). Amsterdam: Benjamins, 2006. Pp. vi + 363. $156.00 cloth.

As noted by one of the contributors to this Festschrift volume, Lydia White is widely regarded as the ostensible mother of research in SLA from a generative linguistics perspective. This volume consists of an introduction and 14 chapters edited and written by McGill University alumni who have studied with White. The collection covers an impressive range of topics, mostly in generative SLA, in various linguistic domains including phonology, morphosyntax, lexical and formal semantics, the syntax-discourse/pragmatics interface, and language processing. There are also chapters on first language (L1) acquisition, third language acquisition, bilingualism, and language attrition among heritage language speakers.

RAISING CHILDREN BILINGUALLY THROUGH THE ‘ONE PARENT-ONE LANGUAGE’ APPROACH: A CASE STUDY OF JAPANESE MOTHERS IN THE AUSTRALIAN CONTEXT.Takeuchi. Bern: Peter Lang, 2006. Pp. xv + 385. $68.95 paper.

Research on child language acquisition within bilingual families adhering to the “One Parent-One Language” (OPOL) approach has focused on parental attitudes, language status (Romaine, 1989), the quantity of language input (Clyne, 1987; Schlyter, 1993), and the quality of parent-child interactions (Dopke, 1992; Lanza, 1997). Masae Takeuchi's work offers a valuable overview of this past research and reports on her own dissertation study of 25 OPOL families in Australia. Takeuchi adds to the growing body of data demonstrating that the quality of interactions between the minority-language-speaking parent and the child is often a crucial variable in determining the success of the OPOL approach in raising a child with active knowledge of more than one language.