This first volume in an Oxford series of introductions to language study aims to provide both the student of linguistics and the general reader with a broader overview of linguistic science. Widdowson attempts to present a coherent outline of the central issues in linguistics that is accessible to the novice yet not simplistic. Following the series format, the volume is divided into four sections: Survey, Readings, References, and Glossary.

Edelsky's With Literacy and Justice for All (2nd ed., original work published 1991) is a strong argument for a holistic approach to language and literacy teaching. Although this “theory-in-practice” is primarily intended for L1 literacy teaching, Edelsky makes clear connections to its applicability in L2 classrooms as well. Writing and second languages are language; therefore, they can and should be acquired as children acquire their L1s: in meaningful situations of use. The premise, however, is that the teacher genuinely believes in the Whole Language ideology, which entails equality and empowerment of all students.

The 15 short papers in this volume attempt to integrate the expertise and the rhetoric of language policy, sociolinguistics, language teaching, and translation in international administrative institutions.

This book presents and discusses efforts to develop Intelligent Computer Assisted Language Learning (ICALL) programs based on advances in artificial intelligence (AI) and natural language processing (NLP). Sixteen of the book's 20 chapters provide descriptions of particular ICALL programs, divided into three categories: text-based language tutors and learning environments, dialogue-based language games, and graphics-based language tutors and learning environments. Four chapters at the end offer general commentary on ICALL from the perspectives of experimental psychology (by Brian MacWhinney), linguistics and AI (by Alan Bailin), second language acquisition theory (by Nina Garret), and educational theory (by Rebecca Oxford).

A Course in Language Teaching covers a wide variety of topics related to language teaching, from reading to testing to syllabus design. The book contains 22 modules organized into seven sections. Each module contains short bits of prose followed by tasks, questions, applications, or sample activities. Most of the modules have boxes of well-summarized information on a particular point (e.g., types of grammar practice, ways of presenting new vocabulary, learner difficulties in listening).

Freeman claims this volume “marks the first step in establishing a formal research base for language teacher education” (p. 352). The direction in which the editors apparently believe language-teacher education needs to move, as stated in the chapter by Richards and his coauthors, is “away from an ‘applied linguistics’ orientation toward one which focuses on teaching in its own terms” (p. 243).

Most of the 14 papers in this volume were presented at the 1992 conference on Discourse and the Professions in Sweden. The collection focuses on diverse professional contexts and discourses (law, medicine, social work, mediation, teaching, economics, and science) as well as written, spoken, and nonverbal communication in European languages. The papers range from speech-act analyses of legal documents such as wills, patents, and contracts to the sociopolitical critique of the discursive practices surrounding doctors, patients, and the recipients of social assistance. The volume is held together thematically by each researcher's effort to demonstrate how professional ways of speaking are constantly being enacted, reenacted, and adapted in society.

Who speaks English? For what purposes? What kind of language has English become? These questions are addressed in the collection of articles under review.

The Design of Language is a comprehensive introduction to general descriptive linguistics and the typology of language. The book is divided into nine chapters, which discuss linguistic levels, sounds and phonemes, more abstract phonology, grammatical categories, morphemes, morphophonemics, morphosyntax, syntax, and more abstract syntax. The chapters on abstract phonology and syntax introduce slightly more advanced issues (such as underlying levels, transformational rules, and Universal Grammar); otherwise, the book covers topics introduced at the undergraduate level. The supplementary readings at the end of most sections refer students to other textbooks and primary literature.

In this provocative book, six coauthors, representing cognitive psychology, connectionism, neurobiology, and dynamical-systems theory, synthesize a new theoretical framework for cognitive development with special focus on language acquisition. In the Emergentist perspective, interactions occurring at all levels, from genes to environment, give rise to emergent forms and behavior. These outcomes may be highly constrained and universal, but they are not themselves directly contained in the genes in any domain-specific way. The human body contains perhaps 5 × 1028 bits of information in its molecular arrangement, but our genome contains only about 105 bits of information. Thus, we are over 20 orders of magnitude short of being mosaic organisms, where development is prespecified in the genes. Our development is under regulatory control, where precise pathways to adulthood reflect numerous interactions at the cellular level occurring throughout development. The human cortex is plastic, its architecture reflects experience; innate specification of synaptic connectivity in the cortex is highly unlikely. Theories of language must reflect this—they must be biologically, developmentally, and ecologically plausible. Linguistic representational nativism is just not tenable. It is so implausible that UG could be directly encoded in the genotype that we must explore the alternatives. So the answer is not “Nature.” Nor, as the authors so clearly argue, is it “Nature or Nuture.” Rather, it is “Nature and Nurture.”

This study deals with the simultaneous acquisition of Portuguese, Spanish, and Hebrew by two children and compares this with the historical development of Iberian-based contact-induced vernaculars (“creole,” koine, and fusion languages).

Professor Schwarz is the most recent contributor to the John M. MacEachran Memorial Lecture Series. In this timely essay, Schwarz takes a position critical of traditional psychological research asserting that: “Our [psychologists'] focus on individual thought processes has fostered a neglect of the social context in which individuals do their thinking and this neglect has contributed to the less than flattering portrait that psychology has painted of human judgment” (p. 1). He posits that “fallacies of human judgment” reported in studies of cognition and communication are actually fallacies of the research—specifically, the researchers' failure to take into account the human mind's capacity to make sense of things, particularly through communication embedded in social context. His point is an important one. When involved in conversation (even in the research laboratory), humans may suspend their abstract knowledge of the logic of language and attend to irrelevant and misleading information—especially if they assume that the speaker's intentions are to convey information and to make sense. Schwarz reports that “ordinary kinds of talk” build on Gricean conversational implicatures, inferences that “go beyond the semantic meaning of what is being said by determining the pragmatic meaning of the utterance” (p. 11). Researchers underestimate the power of these inferences and, by presenting decontextualized, at times absurd, information, they fail to accurately measure their subjects' “human judgment,” but instead observe their subjects' diligent, and often expert, attempts to make sense of the message.