Kingsley Bolton, Chinese Englishes: A sociolinguistic history. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Pp. xviii, 338. Hb US$70.00.

Almost everyone knows that many places in the non-Anglophone world have had a long and tumultuous love affair with English, yet few are aware of China's flirtation, if not infatuation, with it. But with at least 200 million students of English in mainland China alone (Yong & Campbell 1995) – more than two-thirds of the population of the United States – the romance could hardly have been hidden for long. Kingsley Bolton has been letting the secret out for the past decade. This fascinating, timely, and very readable new book is the result of his many years of perseverance. In short, English in China has had “a long and barely remembered history” (p. xiii) which stretches back to the beginnings of maritime trade of Britain with Canton and Macao.

Alan Davies & Catherine Elder (eds.), The handbook of applied linguistics. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004. Pp. viii, 866. Hb $139.95.

The Handbook of Applied Linguistics is the latest in the Blackwell Handbooks in Linguistics Series, which covers the major subdisciplines within linguistics. The previous 16 volumes have provided an extensive state-of-the-art overview of areas ranging from Child Language to Morphology, and from Contemporary Semantic Theory to Language and Gender. This latest volume collects 32 articles within the field of applied linguistics, adding to the list of recent major publications in applied linguistics (e.g., Cook 2003, Gass & Makoni 2004, Kaplan 2002, McCarthy 2001) that, with varying emphases, demonstrate the broad range of the discipline as well as indicating some of the different ways in which it can be conceptualized.

Philip Glenn, Laughter in interaction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Pp. xi, 190, Hb $75.00.

Drawing on extant research in conversation analysis (CA) and other fields, Glenn's entry in the “Studies in Interactional Sociolinguistics” series is both an excellent introduction to CA for those outside the field and an interesting exploration of the social phenomenon of laughter. The first chapter gives a general survey of the research, which has often focused on the physicality of laughter and its relation to humor. Ultimately, however, the chapter suggests a function of laughter beyond expressing amusement: affiliation with co-participants in social interaction. In chap. 2, Glenn provides a helpful outline of CA. He emphasizes CA's focus on participants' perspectives and provides a cogent explanation for CA's meticulous transcription conventions with the example of silences, marked on CA transcripts in tenths of seconds. To leave them out, he argues, would be to assume from the beginning that silences in talk mean nothing (p. 37) – an idea that most competent talkers, let alone CA researchers, would reject out of hand.

Publications received (through 1 December 2005).

Stuart Greene & Dawn Abt-Perkins (eds.), Making race visible: Literacy research for cultural understanding. New York & London: Teachers College Press, 2003. Pp. xi, 220. Hb $52.00, Pb $24.95.

Making race visible: Literacy research for cultural understanding (2003) reveals that racialized ways of thinking, relating, and teaching continue to be integral aspects of our society and our schools. An important task for researchers and practitioners concerned with social justice is the examination of race and racism, and this is the primary undertaking of the authors who contributed to this volume. It presents research conducted both by university-based scholars and by practitioners (teachers who are doing research), providing rich insights from a variety of perspectives. In examining issues of race and racism in literacy instruction, the authors included have four main objectives: to study local literacy practices through long-term commitments to communities; to acknowledge and theorize their own racialized positions as literacy researchers; to examine the ethics of their research agendas; and finally, to use literacy research for positive social change.

Darrell T. Tryon & Jean-Michel Charpentier, Pacific pidgins and creoles: Origins, growth and development. (Trends in Linguistics, Studies and Monographs 132). Berlin & New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 2004. Pp. xix, 559. Hb $123.20.

The authors of this substantial volume each have more than 30 years of research experience in the Pacific region, primarily in Melanesia – especially Vanuatu (formerly the New Hebrides). This focus is reflected in the content. Despite the title, the book deals only with Pacific pidgins and creoles that are lexified by English, thus leaving out, for example, Tayo (a French-lexified creole of New Caledonia). Furthermore, it concentrates almost entirely on the three dialects of Melanesian Pidgin: Tok Pisin (Papua New Guinea), Pijin (Solomon Islands), and Bislama (Vanuatu), with an emphasis on the latter.

Gene Lerner (ed.), Conversation analysis: Studies from the first generation. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2004. Pp. 300. Hb $138.00, Pb $65.95.

Conversation analysis developed in the mid to late 1960s in a collaboration initially between Harvey Sacks and Emanuel Schegloff and, somewhat later, with the addition of Gail Jefferson. By the early 1970s, several students joined the group, by this point based at the University of California campuses at Irvine and Los Angeles, to form what Lerner calls “the first generation.” Conversation analysis has continued to grow, indeed has flourished, in the years since. Today conversation analysts are to be found not only in the United Stated, Canada, and the United Kingdom, but also Japan, Korea, Germany, Finland, the Netherlands, and many other countries. There are conversation analysts in departments of sociology, linguistics, anthropology, communication, and psychology, as well as in many modern language and applied programs. The widespread success of conversation analysis is largely attributable to three characteristics of its research program:

Ho Wah Kam & Ruth Y. L. Wong (eds.), English language teaching in East Asia today: Changing policies and practices. 2nd ed. Singapore: Eastern Universities Press, 2004. Pp. 474. Hb $30.00.

Ho Wah Kam & Ruth Y. L. Wong (eds.), Language policies and language education: The impact in East Asian countries in the next decade. 2nd ed. Singapore: Eastern Universities Press, 2004. Pp. 384. Hb $30.00.

These two volumes, edited by two distinguished scholars in language education from Singapore, provide basic, essential, up-to-date information about the language situations and development of English language teaching in East Asian countries. Together they form a valuable encyclopedic reference work that will give scholars, teachers, and language policy makers a bigger picture of the Asian region through which they can better understand the position of their own countries and learn from the experience of others. Although the two volumes can be read independently, it is more logical to sequence Language policies and language education before English language teaching in East Asia today because the former provides an overview of language policies and language education in the region from a macro perspective, which helps to set out the necessary contextual background for a micro exploration into issues of English language teaching in the second volume. The editors take pride in the fact that the two books provide an “insiders' perspective,” meaning that all the country-based chapters were written by scholars who have lived in the given country for a long time. Indeed, this helps to establish high credibility for the information provided. On the good foundation that these two volumes have laid, comparative studies across countries in the region can be conducted more easily and efficiently.

Rebecca Rogers (ed.), An introduction to critical discourse analysis in education. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2004. Pp. 266, Hb $59.95, Pb $27.50.

An introduction to critical discourse analysis in education has eleven chapters, three by the editor, Rebecca Rogers. The volume attempts to apply Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) to various formal and informal educational settings, and to situate CDA within a theory of learning. Most chapters begin with definitions of “central concepts,” and Rogers has sprinkled discussion prompts throughout.

Aaron A. Fox, Real country: Music and language in working-class culture. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004. Pp., 363. Hb $79.95, Pb $22.95.

The past decade has seen a spate of books about country music. Following in the footsteps of classic work by Bill Malone, a number of these recent works are outstanding, but even the best among them (Peterson 1999; Tichi 1994, 1998; Jensen 1998) have taken a Nashville-centric perspective (or, in the case of Ching 2003, anti-Nashville-centrism), exploring and interrogating the development of country as a commercial genre. Aaron Fox's Real country, by contrast, is distinctive in its detailed ethnographic exploration of country as a lived working-class reality expressed in linguistic and musical discourse forms.

Publications received through 24 April 2005.

This issue of Language in Society is the final issue in the first volume of the journal to have appeared under my editorship. I am grateful for the support of the Department of English at Carnegie Mellon University. I am also very grateful to editorial assistant Craig O. Stewart and copyeditor Jane McGary, as well as to Barbara Chin, Morrell Gillette, and Robert Dreesen at Cambridge University Press.