This volume consists of a collection of 13 papers from the 23rd International L.A.U.D. conference on “The Cultural Context in Communication Across Languages” held at the University of Duisburg, Germany, in March, 1997. The conference was concerned with two different aspects of cross-cultural communication: business communication and the cultural dimension of foreign language teaching. The papers dealing with this second aspect are collected in the present volume.

This volume contains 10 original chapters reflecting research and discussion on the issue of focus on form (FonF) in second language instruction. As the editors point out in the preface, it is timely now to discuss and clarify terminology and research issues in FonF studies, mainly because of the diversity of reactions to this construct. The central aim of the chapters is to explore the nature and feasibility of FonF and their intended audience is second language acquisition (SLA) researchers and language teaching practitioners, as well as graduate students in the field of applied linguistics.

This book, which focuses on the Lowland Scots variety of English spoken in Glasgow, is a welcome addition to the John Benjamins series “Varieties of English Around the World.” Macaulay brings together work based on data collected in three decades—the '70s, '80s, and '90s. The 12 chapters thus represent several strands of research, all centered on the basic theme of language standards and variation. Macaulay argues that the “view of the inherent superiority of standardized varieties is misleading and that allvarieties of language persist because they are functional for their speakers” (p. 5).

The phenomenon of styleswitching has been important in the study of L1 and L2 language use. Labov's early studies correlated formal style with attention paid to speech, a notion echoed in Krashen's monitor model. Giles' accommodation theory and Bell's audience design theory claim that speakers styleswitch in order to accommodate to the speech of their audience. Several SLA scholars have found evidence for accommodation in L2 speech as well. Such correlational studies have been criticized for lacking a clear foundation in cognitive theory. In this volume Myers-Scotton describes her Markedness Model (MM), which grounds styleswitching (including codeswitching) in the cognitive theory of somatic markers (Damasio, 1994). Because speech styles are distinguished mainly by the frequency at which certain features (such as dropping a consonant from a cluster) appear, variationists have sought to identify a cognitive mechanism that could account for the apparent fine-tuning of feature frequencies. However, it is not clear from the discussion in this volume whether the somatic marker hypothesis provides such a mechanism.

More than 75 years ago, at the Second All-Russian Psychoneurological Congress, L. S. Vygotsky presented a paper, “Methods of Reflexological and Psychological Investigations,” in which he began to lay the foundation for a unified theory of mind. Vygotsky's concern was that psychology had lost sight of the uniqueness of human mental functioning, which for him resides in our ability to intentionally mediate, and hence regulate, our biologically specified mental systems (i.e., in today's jargon, input systems) through culturally determined means. Contemporary sociocultural psychologists, J. V. Wertsch in particular, have noted that, although Vygotsky called for the unification of psychology, in his writings, he actually paid very little attention to one part of the mental equation—the biological, or natural, mind. As it turns out, even those who fault Vygotsky for his failure here have themselves not focused much attention on the contribution of the natural, or what Frawley refers to as the computational, mind, preferring instead to concentrate on the sociocultural parameters of cognition. The present book can be seen as an attempt to bring to fruition Vygotsky's earlier vision of a unified psychology.

Scholars in the multidisciplinary fields of language studies will benefit from acquiring Language and Its Normal Processingby Vivien Tartter. The volume, which functions well as a textbook or reference book, contains chapters incorporating basic concepts, themes, trends, and controversies in psycholinguistics. One of the author's principal interests in writing the book (and for us to read the book) is to “communicate the fun and excitement . . . in psycholinguistic research” (p. xv). The author successfully synthesizes research on a variety of topics: meaning and meaning processing; syntax and sentence processing; speech and its perception and production; as well as presentations on sociolinguistics; first and second language acquisition, and multilingualism; and the psychology of reading and writing printed text.

The goal of this volume is to provide a rich, interdisciplinary foundation of empirical studies describing the discourse of Language Proficiency Interviews (LPIs), focusing on “interactional competence.” The studies not only show how difficult it is to validly assess oral proficiency; they also show that discourse analysis of LPIs—as the editors point out—is very much in its infancy. Most of these studies face research design challenges (e.g., small sample size, sample comparability, coding reliability, or a combination of these), yet they illustrate the potential contributions of various (mostly qualitative) discourse analytic approaches to an understanding and assessment of oral proficiency.

This book is an outstanding contribution to the literature on language policy, language planning, and language rights. It provides a fascinating comparative treatment of developments related to issues of language and politics in the United States and Canada. Divided into five sections, the book includes chapters that present broad overviews of the demographic and policy situations in the two nations, chapters on indigenous languages in North America, chapters on the legal implications of official language policies, chapters on educational issues related to language policies, and finally, chapters addressing issues of language services and language rights.

This book is intended for teachers of children whose first language is not English and who are in mainstream classes in an English-speaking country. It has a strong orientation toward Great Britain.

Teachers will find this book useful both for self-study and teaching. The linguist-authors introduce nonspecialist readers to the rich landscape of local and parochial ways of speaking that still exist in the United States, despite the uniforming pressures from the language of the national media and leveling effects on language of individual mobility. They account for linguistic facts of differences between dialects (in chapters 1 and 2 and the appendix) and also between different discourse styles (chapter 3). They do this with respect for differences between people. A major purpose of the book is to counter misconceptions that dialect speakers are somehow deficient. They are not, of course. They are anchored in the local community or group, and this local grounding is socially-psychologically sound and represents a very positive value indeed; or from another neutral perspective, they simply talk differently. Dialects are good or different, but never bad, unless people think others are bad just because they talk differently. The book helps any reader shed such groundless prejudice.

According to the editors of this volume, models and theories of linguistic analysis that are based on a study of monolingual societies are no longer appropriate for our contemporary world. Fueled by an interest in examining “multilingual and pluricultural societies where learning more than one language and accommodating multiple identities is a way of life” (p. 17), they have collected 11 papers as well as an introductory essay that analyze second language learning in a range of interesting multicultural settings. For example, there are papers on the acquisition of Hindi by Tamils in Delhi, English and German by Indian undergraduates at the University of Delhi, and English by immigrants from six different countries in Britain.

This updated version of Cruttenden's popular first edition (1986, reprinted in 1989, 1991, 1994, & 1995) focuses on British English but also discusses other varieties of English, comparative intonation, universals, and L1 acquisition. Much of the work is unchanged from the original, yet this edition includes a significant update to the literature.

Elizabeth Coelho's Teaching and Learning in Multicultural Schools(TLMS) is a very good book for its kind. Its primary audience is teachers at the primary and secondary level of schools in situations of cultural pluralism, the “multicultural” of the title. Schools are actually rarely multicultural, even if their students represent different cultures in contact, but rather serve as the major instrument of acculturation and assimilation into the dominant ideology. TLMSattempts to counteract this tendency by a valiant attempt of an “account of what is required to teach and learn effectively in multicultural schools” (p. x)! Coelho's ultimate goal is using the schools as agents for change in society, affirming the richness and stimulation to be found in cultural diversity.

From time to time, the annual Language Testing Research Colloquium (LTRC) publishes its papers. Kunnan, his contributors, and Erlbaum are to be commended for a rich, well edited, and thematically unified offering. Some wise decisions were made: author-provided abstracts, references following each paper, author-provided annotated bibliographies, and a rich index. This is more than a collection of conference papers. It is a book in its own right with the potential to become a textbook on language test validation.

The acquisition of Native American languages is an area of study in which there is still much work to be done, and this is especially true of Inuit languages. That alone makes Shanley Allen's Aspects of argument structure acquisition in Inuktitut a welcome addition to the list of publications on first language learning. The book is not, however, strictly intended for those who study Native American language acquisition. The extensive background information provided, both theoretical and methodological, makes Allen's work accessible to linguists with various interests. Furthermore, although her analysis is based largely on principles and parameters theory, she deliberately makes her research amenable to a variety of theoretical frameworks.

For the last decade, college campuses across the United States have witnessed an influx of U.S.-educated nonnative speakers of English. Many of these students come to postsecondary institutions with almost nativelike communicative competence yet marginal literacy skills. This mismatch in proficiency has proved to be a daunting challenge to ESL and composition faculty. Furthermore, few researchers have examined the linguistic needs of this population, creating a gap in our knowledge of how best to intervene with these students. Generation 1.5 Meets College Composition: Issues in the Teaching of Writing to U.S.-Educated Learners of ESLis one of the first attempts to fill that void. This noteworthy volume brings together the current research on U.S.-educated learners of ESL, or Generation 1.5, a reference to U.S.-educated immigrant students who are caught somewhere between the cultural and linguistic experiences of the first and second generations.

In his introduction, Campbell makes a case for the broader relevance of historical linguistics by noting that observing what does and does not change in language contributes to “the understanding of universal grammar, language typology, and human cognition in general” (p. 2). The generativist perspective that phonological and syntactic changes are linked to language acquisition, cited on page 236, illustrates one interface between historical linguistics and general linguistic theory.

This volume is a valuable contribution to the field of language teacher education (LTE) because of its innovative approach to language learning and teaching as well as its consistent organization. As noted in the introduction, the book is intended for language teachers “who will make, or have made, the step from teaching to training” (p. 1). To this end, the author relates the teachers' experience and understanding of the classroom context to a broadly social constructivist perspective, based on the relevance of the personal and social dimensions of learning to teach.

As indicated by the title of this volume, this collection of public speeches, conference presentations, and practical tips for the elementary foreign language classroom truly celebrates the vibrancy and mission exhibited by many teachers of foreign languages at the elementary level. The designation FLES* (pronounced “flestar”) has been created by Lipton as an “overall term for all types of elementary school foreign language programs” (p. 1), including sequential FLES (Foreign Language in the Elementary School), FLEX (Foreign Language Exploratory), and Immersion. According to Lipton, the term “sequential FLES” subsumes the model usually referred to as FLES.

Traditionally, the study of the social dimensions of interpersonal communication has been separated from the study of the cognitive dimensions. Recent research efforts from both social and cognitive psychology, however, have made apparent the value of integrating both approaches for increasing our understanding of language use. The volume by Fussell and Kreuz is an excellent illustration of these efforts.