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.

We present a learner corpus-based study of English article use (“a”/“the”/Ø) by L2 learners with four typologically distinct first languages (L1s): German and Brazilian Portuguese (both have articles), Chinese and Russian (no articles). We investigate several semantic and morphosyntactic factors—for example, specificity, prenominal modification that can affect article use. Our analysis of 660 written scripts from the Education First Cambridge Open Database confirms the lower overall accuracy of learners with no-article L1s. Our main finding is the differential effect of specificity on definite and indefinite articles: learners tend to associate specificity with “a,” which implies article omission with nonspecific indefinite singulars and overuse of “a” with specific indefinite mass nouns. Prenominal modifiers further contribute to perceived specificity, leading to article overuse with modified indefinite mass nouns. However, in definite contexts, prenominal modifiers are associated with increased article omission.

In its 20 chapters, this edited book opens new paths for theory and research in the area of foreign and second language (L2) motivation. It will be particularly useful to researchers, graduate students, and others who want to see an array of approaches to the topic. Both qualitative and quantitative investigations are included along with a number of themes that have not yet received much research attention: learning strategies and motivation, teacher motivation and its effect on learner motivation, personal identity, extrinsic and intrinsic motivation and beyond, unsuccessful learners' motivation, demotivation, and learning as “foraging.”

This study investigates whether the use of prosodic cues during instruction facilitates the processing of German accusative case markers. Two groups of third semester L1 English learners of L2 German completed Processing Instruction (PI) with aural input: Learners in the PI+P group heard sentences that included focused prosodic cues; learners in the PI group heard sentences with monotone prosody. The effects of training were assessed through an offline comprehension task, a written production task, and an online self-paced reading (SPR) task. The results for the offline tasks showed that the groups were similar with respect to their offline comprehension and production. The SPR task showed that both groups used case markers to interpret word order online to some extent; however, only the PI+P group did so in all conditions. These results suggest that prosody does play a role in (morpho)syntactic processing, and that covert activation of prosodic structures can facilitate processing during online reading tasks.

Maintaining A Minority Language: A Case Study of Hispanic Teenagers. John Gibbons and Elizabeth Ramirez. Clevedon, UK: Multilingual Matters, 2004. Pp. x + 240. £25.95 paper.

On reading the title of this volume, the reader might assume that the study involves teenagers in a large urban area of the United States. Potential readers will be surprised to realize that this book is about Hispanic teenagers in Sydney, Australia, and the efforts of these teens and their families to maintain their Spanish language. The authors, Gibbons and Ramirez, argue that the understanding of minority language maintenance and shift “requires the examination of the degree of acquisition of various elements of proficiency, including spoken language, basic literacy skills, grammar and high register” (p. l). Thus, having set a rather rigorous benchmark for themselves, they proceed to study 106 Hispanic teenagers to determine the degree of maintenance of Spanish among them as well as their attitudes toward their bilingualism.

This paper summarizes some characteristics of Navajo and Western Apache speakers' tense switching in English and some observations on native English speakers' tense switching. It is suggested to teachers who have Southwestern Indian students in their classes to avoid restricting students to one particular tense in an artificial manner and to approach interlingual tense switching within a contrastive framework.

This paper responds to David Birdsong's discussion of the positions and the data presented in Felix (1988) and Zobl (1992). We attempt to clarify a number of misconceptions that we feel characterize his discussion and elaborate further on the performance and competence issues contained in the earlier papers.

This volume charts the development of contrastive rhetoric (CR) over the past 30 years. Although CR has not attempted to identify developmental stages of L2 writers, it is essentially the study of transfer: the influence of L1 writing conventions and cultural and cognitive dimensions on L2 writing. Major strengths of this book are its critical review of the literature, concise definitions, and documentation of the progression of CR from narrow L2 text-based analyses to the inclusion of multiple approaches.

In the introduction to The power of tests: A critical perspective on the uses of language tests, Elana Shohamy raises the following questions: What is the meaning of a test for test takers, parents, teachers, and school administrators? What are the short- and long-term consequences of tests on the lives of individuals? What are the motivating factors behind the administration of language tests? What are the politics of the tests? These kinds of questions logically arise when the examination of testing includes a concern with the use of tests by educational institutions, policy makers, and society at large. Focusing primarily on the misuse of tests, this volume chronicles both intended and unintended test consequences.

C'est un truisme que de dire que la grammaire descriptive traditionelle repose sur des notions vagues et floues. L'absence de concepts dignes de ce nom fait que ce type de grammaire (le plus répandu encore aujourd'hui hélas!) ne peut décrire que ce que l'on voit -- à savoir l'énoncé linéaire de surface (c'est ce que Chomsky appelle “le niveau observationnel”). C'est ainsi par exemple que le sujet grammatical d'un énoncé, à cause de la place privilégiée qu'il occupe dans la chaîne linéaire, se voit attribuer implicitement ou explicitement, le rôle de locomotive de la phrase (“c'est le sujet qui fait l'action”). Mais le sujet grammatical n'est pas seul à ne pas avoir de statut précis dans la grammaire scolaire. Si on regarde du côté du verbe, on constate que ce dernier reçoit des labels tels que “dynamique” ou “statique” selon qu'il exprime “une action” ou “un état.” Il est permis de se demander ce que des labels de ce genr- peuvent bien apporter à la compréhension des phénomènes GRAMMATICAUX étant donné qu'ils renvoient purement et simplement à l'extralinguistique! Toujours en relation avec le verbe, la grammaire scolaire de l'anglais parle “D'ACTION EN COURS” lorsqu'on se trouve en présence de la forme dite “progressive” (BE + ING). Implicitement une action en cours renvoie à un acteur, à un agent responsable: nous retrouvons ici la “locomotive de la phrase” et la croyance naïve, toujours implicite, que la grammaire d'une langue colle à la réalité extralinguistique, qu'elle en est le calque fidèle et qu'en conséquence le seul problème pour une grammaire est d'établir ce type de correspondance biunivoque entre discours et réalité, entre les mots et les choses. On retrouve le slogan “c'est le sujet qui fait l'action” jusque dans la façon dont sont traités et définis les verbes dits “défectifs,” à propos desquels on dira qu'ils ne prennent pas d's a la troisième personne du singulier -- ce qui trahit une conception linéaire de l'énoncé -- et aussi, ajoutons-le, un manque total d'ouverture sur le problème de la structuration des énoncés.

DEVELOPING PROFESSIONAL-LEVEL LANGUAGE PROFICIENCY. Betty Lou Leaver and Boris Shekhtman (Eds.). New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Pp. xiv + 308. $65.00 cloth, $24.00 paper.

In the face of a vast array of non-English culture and language media, increases in diaspora populations in the United States and elsewhere, the importance of global circuits of capital (and hence global communicative practices), and the increasing penetration of world events into the lives of Americans (with its implications for national security), one would surmise that developing professional-level additional language expertise would not be the exception that it is in the United States. Lambert (2001) described the low percentage of American students who study a foreign language at the advanced level and estimated that only 3% of those studying commonly taught languages such as Spanish or French enroll in advanced-level courses. Although support for less commonly taught languages (LCTL) such as Arabic have recently increased, students enrolled in LCTL programs are presumably even fewer in number. It is also clear that advanced-level coursework occupies only a fraction of most language programs' overall investment of resources. In a fiscal climate that makes the academy increasingly accountable to private sector logic, few interested students make developing advanced language programs a nonutilitarian choice.

WASHBACK IN LANGUAGE TESTING: RESEARCH CONTEXTS AND METHODS. Liying Cheng, Yoshinori Watanabe, and Andy Curtis (Eds.). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum, 2004. Pp. xxi + 233. $27.50 paper.

Since Alderson and Wall (1993) posited a seemingly rhetorical question, “Does washback exist?” language testing professionals have directed attention to the impact of testing on teaching, learning, educational outcomes, and individuals. This edited volume is the culmination of language testing professionals' conscious efforts to better understand washback. It bears rich testimony to the complex nature of washback phenomena in every corner of educational systems. It is a useful resource for those seeking guidance on their own washback studies—for teachers and school administrators who are haunted by the power of tests and for those who need empirical evidence for and against test washback in specific testing situations.