recommended for aid donors and project teacher training course there, and co-ordinated it

managers. Holliday says that a certain amount of from 1992. He joined the English Department of
'impression management' and 'repression of the City University of New York (Baruch
conflict-provoking findings' is important while College) in September 1994. He has published
working in expatriate settings: 'The means articles in TESOL Quarterly, Language in Society,
analysis might have to be a covert procedure World Englishes, and Multilingua, focusing on the
because of the inevitability of cultural difference ethnography of ELT, codeswitching, and bilingu-
between the curriculum developer and local alism. His PhD in applied linguistics from the
personnel' (p. 217). By this time I (as a University of Texas, Austin, was granted in 1990
periphery professional) begin to feel as if I am for a sociolinguistic analysis of challenges in
listening to a conversation in which I am not a academic writing for African-American students.
participant; a conversation between centre-based
project managers and scholars on how to trade in
the periphery in a gentlemanly but profitable way. Second Language Learning:
If the book is primarily written for aid donors, Theoretical Foundations
project managers, and expatriate teachers, Michael Sharwood Smith
Holliday does achieve the purpose of educating Longman 1994 235 pp £12.99
them on the problems surrounding methods ISBN 0 582 218861
transfer. But I wish he had had the theoretical
sophistication, historical awareness, and The Study of Second Language
methodological rigour to empower periphery Acquisition
language teachers through this book as well. Rod Ellis
Oxford University Press 1994 824 pp £19.00
References ISBN 0 19 437189 1
Asad, T. (ed.) 1973. Anthropology and the
Colonial Encounter. New York: Humanities Although these books share the same year of
Press. publication, cover some of the same ground, and
Canagarajah, A. S. 1993. 'Critical ethnography of are written for a similar readership, they are very
a Sri Lankan classroom: ambiguities in opposi- different in style and intent. Sharwood Smith, for
tion to" reproduction through ESOL'. TESOL instance, explains syntactic development and the
Quarterly 27/4: 601-26. notion of interlanguage from a cognitive and
Frank, A. G. 1969. Latin America: Underdevelop- largely linguistic viewpoint; Ellis presents a
ment or Revolution. New York: Monthly comprehensive overview of academic studies in
Review Press. second language acquisition from a variety of
Geertz, C. 1983. Local Knowledge: Further Essays disciplinary sources—taxonomic, linguistic,
in Interpretive Anthropology. New York: Basic psycho-linguistic, sociolinguistic, and herme-
Books. neutic. This review considers each book in turn,
Peirce, B. N. 1989. 'Towards a pedagogy of then compares them in terms of their approach,
possibility in teaching of English internation- coverage, and style.
ally'. TESOL Quarterly 23/3: 401-20. Second Language Learning is structured in a
Pennycook, A. 1989. 'The concept of "method", roughly chronological fashion, with three main
interested knowledge, and the politics of sections: 'Towards theory' opens with a useful
language teaching'. TESOL Quarterly 23/4, general introduction, followed by four chapters
589-618. which describe the beginnings of second language
Phillipson, R. 1992. Linguistic Imperialism. acquisition work, interlanguage, the creative
Oxford: Oxford University Press. construction approach, and a discussion of
Wallerstein, I. 1991. Geopolitics and Geoculture. research methods used; 'Revisions and
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Alternatives' is divided into two chapters which
Willis, P. 1978. Profane Cultures. London: Rout- describe and critique developments in the 1970's
ledge. and early 1980's in variability theory, the Monitor
model, interlanguage theory, learnability theory,
A. Suresh Canagarajah, City University of New and other alternatives.
York; University of Jaffna, Sri Lanka.
'The Coming of Age' consists of four main
chapters, which present the most up-to-date
The reviewer work since the late 1980s on applications of
A. Suresh Canagarajah was a senior lecturer in linguistics to the study of second language
English at the University of Jaffna, Sri Lanka, acquisition: markedness theory, Universal
from 1984 to 1994. He pioneered a postgraduate Grammar, and parameter setting; there is a final
82 Reviews
brief chapter on the implications and applications
of the understanding gained. It is clear that
Sharwood Smith's motivation in writing the book
was to set out the emergent sophistication of
theory in explaining how people learn a second
language. Chapters 6 and 7 are central to these
discussions. They consider the shortcomings in,
and counter-arguments to, interlanguage and
creative construction theory; some modern
linguistic theory is brought to bear in various
areas of application. These chapters form a kind of
pivot between the earlier part of the book—which
is tied fairly closely to the work of Corder, Dulay,
and Burt, Krashen, and Selinker—and Chapter 8,
the longest in the book. This is about the way
modern work has used Universal Grammar as its
inspiration, relating it to learnability theory, the
alternative ways in which a second language
learner might have access to this biologically-
stored information (the 'fossilized view', the
'recreative view', and the 'resetting view'), and
various problems that arise when invoking this
powerful but somewhat fluid body of theory to
explore and explain second language acquisition.
The same chapter also tackles, with admirable
clarity, the difficult issues of under-specification
and negative evidence.
Sharwood Smith is not totally committed to any
one narrow theoretical position, and some of his
most interesting comments concern the distinction
between the acquisition of knowledge and the
control of knowledge. These topics occur
frequently throughout the text, but receive
particular attention in the last, shorter chapter.
This considers implications and applications, and
summarizes, in relatively non-technical language,
the arguments on knowledge, control,
teachability, and modularity advanced in the rest
of the book. It is unfortunate that Sharwood
Smith's only mention of a language teaching
technique appears to resurrect the old argument
for drilling—that it promotes greater control of
already acquired knowledge—rather than apply
the powerful theoretical resources displayed to the
analysis of teacher feedback modes, classroom
procedural language, the debate concerning lesson
structure, present-day language testing practice, or
any of the other current worries of those
concerned with the design of language pro-
grammes. This reflects a seemingly deliberate,
but regrettable, remoteness from today's language
classroom.
One of the best features of the author's style is his
imaginative use of illuminating analogies—
between grammar and traffic rules (p.151), for
example, and between the language learner and
the bridge builder (p.149). Students who have
worked through the book have reported finding
these refreshingly clear. The readership for the
book is imagined to be teachers (whether of
languages or applied linguistics is not clear),
students, and full time researchers. The book
begins with a useful summary of the issues to be
examined. There are ample study questions for
each chapter, and a full glossary of terms which
will be helpful for students on MA or
postgraduate diploma courses. Chapter 4, on
analysing interlanguage, might be most useful to
somebody planning to carry out PhD research in
the area.
The Study of Second Language Acqui-
sition—nearly four times the length of the
Sharwood Smith book (but not four times the
price!)—has remarkable breadth and depth of
coverage. It is, however, far from being an
annotated bibliography of all that's best in
second language acquisition. The author's
intention is to contribute a framework for
conceptualizing the SLA field, and to use that
framework to present each pertinent area of
research in a comparable manner. Ellis's
introduction spells out carefully who he is
writing for—students of SLA research,
researchers who need surveys of subfields
outside their specialism, and language teachers.
With regard to the last, 'and probably principal'
set of readers (p. 4), the author argues that the
usefulness of his survey of SLA is to help them
evaluate their own practice in two ways: indirectly,
by helping them make their assumptions about
learning explicit, and directly, by providing
information which they can use in pedagogic
decisions. The reader is given help in three
further ways—by the extensive signposting and
frame-drawing comments, a thirty-nine page
glossary of technical terms, and notes and
recommendations for further reading at the end
of each chapter. However, the reader is left alone
to work out how to maximize the use of the book
in the two ways Ellis suggests. As one might
expect, though, in a book of this magnitude, the
author discusses fairly several contrasting
positions in the debate concerning the relevance
of research to teaching and vice versa—even if the
reader has to wait for this until the last three pages
of text (pp. 686-9).
Ellis's organizational framework is an integral part
of what he intends the book to contribute to the
field, and is presented at some length. Each Part,
usually comprising two or three long chapters, is
introduced by a description of the approach taken
and its relation to the overall framework.
Part One, which consists of one chapter only, gives
the author's overview of SLA research, and
Reviews 83
argues for the three-way division that is the key to
the book's structure: description of learner
language, learner-external factors, and learner-
internal factors. Part Two has four chapters on the
description of learner language; Part Three has
two chapters on external factors—social factor,
and input and interaction; Part Four has three
chapters on internal factors—this is where central
topics such as transfer, cognitive accounts, and
linguistic universal are discussed, and where the
book is most directly comparable to Sharwood
Smith's; Part Five has two chapters on individual
differences and learner strategies; and Part Six has
two chapters on classroom interaction research
and formal instruction. The book is completed by
a seventh Part consisting, like the first, of only one
chapter, and by way of conclusion discusses data,
theory, and applications.
The book represents Ellis's second attempt at a
comprehensive account of this field, the first being
the very successful Understanding Second
Language Acquisition (1985). The author's wish
to perceive, or establish, coherence in the
international research effort motivated the
framework and the selection of content in both.
However, neither title specifies its limitations,
which raises the question of which criteria allowed
some work to be counted as 'study' and some not.
Since studyis not the same as teaching, readers
should not expect to find discussions of syllabus
design, testing, or teacher education programmes,
nor reports of action research by teachers either;
nor is study the same as policy, so programme
designers should not seek evaluations of teaching
materials, methods, programmes or studies of
professional topics. However, in the areas in
which a reader may have specialist knowledge, it
is evident that even 690 pages of text cannot
encompass everything. For example, in discussing
the description of learner language, Part Two
carries excellent discussions of error analysis,
developmental patterns, variability, and
interlanguage pragmatics, but nothing of the
work on written language and written interaction
(feedback) which has caused such a stir in the
guise of 'process writing' (see, for example,
several of the papers in Kroll 1990). It would be
difficult to uphold the view that this research is not
part of the study of second language acquisition.
For another example, Ellis treats learner and
learning strategies in two different sections:
communication strategies and compensatory
strategies in Chapter 9, and learning strategies in
Chapter 12. The treatments in each case are
careful, critical, and objective, but there seems to
be no room for the important work on reading
strategies—at least as interesting as the work on
vocabulary acquisition strategies, which is
84 Reviews
described—nor for the challenging work on test-
taking strategies which threatens some of our
cherished beliefs about test validity (see Anderson
et al. 1991). The point here is not that Ellis has
failed to include some of this reader's favourite
references, but that his choice of work for
inclusion is more arbitrarily selective than we are
led to expect from the title.
One of Ellis's aims is to provide surveys of less
familiar areas for people working in the field. It is
instructive to look at how, in Chapter 9, he treats a
difficult area of theorizing, 'Cognitive accounts of
second language acquisition'. Like many of the
chapters, this one opens with a general theoretical
framework, in which the author cross-relates his
main themes. He explains that cognitive accounts
are primarily about knowledge as a basis for use
rather than the representation of linguistic
knowledge per se, introducing the notion of
mastery. This leads to a discussion of
interlanguage, Krashen's Monitor, explicit and
implicit knowledge, and the definition of
consciousness, variability theories, and
functionalist accounts (i.e. language behaviour
theories) such as Bates and MacWhinney's
competition model, operating principles, skill
learning models, and strategic approaches,
finishing with parallel distributed processing.
Each of these major areas of development is
explained and illustrated economically and
clearly. All this in sixty-six pages illustrated with
tables and summary blocks with further reading
suggestions. This general format is maintained in
all the chapters; it is Ellis's major method for
remaining 'objective', by which he means fair to
all the positions adopted in the literature, not only
those to which he is himself most attracted. It is
also the means through which the book remains
self-sufficient, that is, by not assuming prior
knowledge of the various theories and research
traditions surveyed.
It would be wrong to give the impression that the
major content chapters are only concerned with
cognitive theory or linguistics. The whole of Part
Six is concerned with the classroom, at least as far
as SLA research has touched this topic. Chapter
13 in this section looks at classroom interaction
and second language acquisition, and presents an
excellent and many-sided summary of much of the
important research in this area (except, as
mentioned above, that stemming more from an
educational tradition). This chapter illustrates
Ellis's 'fairness' again in not taking sides on the
thorny question of the relevance of quantitative
versus qualitative research, attempting to
represent the field as it stands, and using
methods from both traditions. It also illustrates a
tendency in this book and in Ellis (1985) to
summarize the products of many research papers
in tables like his 'Classroom-based studies of
learner participation' (ibid.: 593), or 'Studies
investigating the effects of task variables on L2
interaction' (ibid.: 597). This apparently useful
way of compressing information and presenting
essentials is ultimately confusing, since the tables
simply present 'facts' baldly, and the enquiring
reader has no means of assessing their status or
validity. The same problem occurs in blocks of
summarized generalizations, for instance 'Social
contexts and potential L2 learning outcomes'
(ibid.: 229). To some extent this problem is
bound to occur where the reader has no access
to the original data and thus no way of assessing
its quality. General summaries may be
symptomatic of what the field of SLA aims for,
but those concerned with implications for teaching
will look in vain for the specific interpretations
which they need for action or change.
Both of these books set out to write about second
language acquisition and learning research and
the ideas that have been proposed to account for
the discoveries. They are not in direct
competition: Sharwood Smith has a limited brief,
which is to present, explore, and critique
theoretical conceptions and the motivations for
them, mainly in the learning of grammar; Ellis has
a comprehensive intention, which is to locate all
the major trends in current research work within
an overall framework. There are dangers in both
approaches. Sharwood Smith makes no attempt to
discuss work apparently outside the rather narrow
limitations of his brief, or to look for challenges or
even confirmatory triangulation in other research
traditions. Ellis manages to present individual
areas and the whole field remarkably coherently
with an astonishing breadth of scholarship (the
bibliography, in a smaller typeface than the main
text, runs to sixty-one pages), but somewhat
misses an opportunity that only this kind of
book can provide, for comparing and contrasting
work and theories from very disparate sources and
traditions. However, perhaps that is the task—
dare one say it—of yet another book.
References
Anderson, NJ., L. Bachman, K. Perkins, and A.
Cohen. 1991. 'An exploratory study into the
construct validity of a reading comprehension
test: triangulation of data sources'. Language
Testing 8/1: 41-66.
Ellis, R. 1985 Understanding Second Language
Acquisition. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Kroll, B. (ed.). 1990. Second Language Writing:
Research Insights for the Classroom. Cambridge: After an introduction which lays out the principles
Cambridge University Press. upon which the authors have based their advice,
Steven McDonough, Lecturer in Applied
Linguistics, Department of Language and
Linguistics, University of Essex
The reviewer
Steven McDonough teaches Applied Linguistics
at Essex. He has directed the MA in Applied
Linguistics and, recently, the MA in ELT, and
courses for teaching certificates and sponsored
groups in the EFL Unit. He has published two
books, Psychology in Foreign Language Teaching
(Allen and Unwin 1981) and Strategy and Skill in
Learning a Foreign Language (Arnold 1995) and
a number of articles. He is mainly interested in
how people learn languages, the design of
teaching programmes and testing instruments,
and in the possibilities of teachers researching
their own situations, the subject of a forthcoming
co-authored book.
The ELT Manager's Handbook
Graham Impey and Nic Underhill
Heinemann 1994 184 pp £11.00
ISBN 0 435 24090 0
The introduction to this book planted the fear in
my mind that it was attempting to be all things to
all people. The target readership appeared to be
rather too wide, ranging from those already
involved in management, to those who simply
want to know and understand more without
necessarily becoming directly involved, to the
new or aspiring managers in the middle of this
broad church. As I read the book it became clear
to me that while it may, in its presentation of one
variety of best practice, make existing managers
feel somewhat uncomfortable, it would provide a
comforting 'how to' guide for those new to
management.
The authors make it clear from the outset that
they do not intend to use management jargon—
indeed, they aim passing swipes at the academic
discipline of management, and prefer to rely upon
'practical on the ground experience' (p. vii).
Having made their disclaimer, however, it
becomes obvious that the book is in fact solidly
founded upon traditional management principles,
•though these are rarely referred to. This is
perhaps a pity for readers who might like to
support this very practical guide with further
academic reading. The chapters of the book
address each of the traditional functions or
operations of management from an ELT
perspective.
Reviews 85