Reviewed by Liwei Gao, Defense Language Institute Foreign Language Center

Although Chinese is now the fastest growing foreign language, taught in many parts of the world, research on the acquisition of Chinese as a foreign language is still disproportionately scarce. This book tries to fill this gap by conducting research on the acquisition of Chinese word order by English-speaking learners. The book consists of eight chapters.

Ch. 1, ‘Introduction’ (1–22), discusses the current progress of second language acquisition (SLA) research on Chinese, the importance of word order in grammar, and the importance of word order in Chinese. In addition to defining terminology relevant to this study, the research objectives, research questions, and significance of this study are also presented.

Ch. 2, ‘Literature review (1): Theoretical approaches applied in L2 word order acquisition research’ (23–56), examines four different SLA approaches to investigating second language (L2) word order acquisition: the universal grammar, processability theory, competition model, and cognitive functionalist approaches. After comparison and evaluation, J concludes that the cognitive functionalist approach provides the most pertinent framework for her study. Ch. 3, ‘Literature review (2): Chinese L2 word order acquisition, word order errors and word order principles’ (57–110), examines existing word order error taxonomies, through which the author identifies the need for a more systematic analysis of principles of Chinese word order, and points out that taxonomies currently available are too limited for describing word order errors in Chinese as a foreign language.

Ch. 4, ‘Research methodology’ (111–34), explains how data should be collected and examined to address the research questions of this study. Here J argues for a cross-sectional research design and critically reviews the methodology of error analysis used in this study. Ways to overcome limitations of this methodology, as shown in previous Chinese L2 studies, are presented as well. Ch. 5, ‘The study’ (135–40), discusses the procedure of data collection and analysis. Details of research participants, data type, and unit of analysis are also presented.

Ch. 6, ‘A principle-based taxonomy of Chinese L2 word order errors’ (141–84), introduces a new comprehensive taxonomy of word order errors made by students of Chinese as a foreign language  incorporating existing categories from the literature and new categories that emerged from the data. This re-categorization promises a more accurate description and more concrete explanation of Chinese L2 word order errors made by English-speaking learners. Ch. 7, ‘Chinese L2 word errors: Relative frequency of occurrence’ (185–98), presents a quantitative overview of the errors collected by documenting how these errors are distributed among the different categories in the new categorization.

Ch. 8, ‘Conclusion’ (199–210), revisits the research objectives, summarizing the main findings and contributions, discussing the limitations of the study and its pedagogical implications, and suggesting topics for future study. Following the references is an eighty-five page appendix containing the word order error corpus.

This study will not only contribute to the understanding of the process of Chinese L2 word order acquisition, but also enable teachers of Chinese as a foreign language to teach Chinese, particularly its word order, in a well-informed, more effective and efficient manner.