Reviewed by Jason Doroga, University of Wisconsin-Madison

This book is an introduction to the history of Spanish, providing a coherent and succinct account appropriate for the general reader interested in the development of the language. Even though it is intended as an introduction, there is a considerable range of topics covered with a particular emphasis on the evolution of phonology and morphology from Latin to Spanish.

In a brief introductory chapter, the author presents the underlying theme of the book: language change is the result of changing sociocultural conditions as well as ‘physical and psychological (cognitive) capabilities and limitations of human users’ (1). The author suggests that the developments discussed in the three main sections of the text (‘Romance’, ‘Castilian’, and ‘Spanish’) may be viewed as examples of these basic concepts.

In the ‘Romance’ section, Chs. 2–4 (6–28) deal with the expansion of Latin in the Roman Empire and the influence of other languages (e.g. Celtic and Basque) on Vulgar Latin. In Chs. 5–6 (29–48) the author asserts that speakers (especially adult speakers of other languages) preferred the greater transparency of analytic/synthetic morphology of Vulgar Latin, as evidenced by the development of the –mente adverbs, comparative and superlative forms, the future and conditional tenses, the passive voice, and the perfect tenses in Romance. The evolution of the sound system is presented in Chs. 7–10 (49–89). The author clearly explains the essentials of articulation and syllable division (49–59) before exploring the effects of the readjustment of the stress system and syllabification on the consonant and vowel systems (60–82). Ch.10 (83–89) presents textual evidence of these changes. A discussion of Germanic, Arabic, and French influence on the language concludes this section.

The ‘Castilian’ section also presents major developments in morphology and in the sound system. Chs. 14–16 (105–16) discuss Castilian verbal morphology and link morphological change to phonological change by demonstrating that many verb irregularities (in particular stem-changing paradigms) are simply the result of sound changes that affect only the stem in specific phonetic environments. The rise of Castilian and the standardization of linguistic forms in the Peninsula during the Reconquest is discussed in Chs. 17–18 (119–28). Also included is a discussion of modern changes in the sound inventory, most notably a clear description of the development of the current sibilant inventory. Ch. 20 (142–55) covers morphological and lexical changes, including topics such as terms of address and the grammaticalization of haber.

The ‘Spanish’ section (which is considerably shorter than the previous two) presents the major characteristics of Spanish as a world language. Ch. 21 (156–65) discusses morphological features of American Spanish while the final two chapters (167–76) discuss the influence of the Academy and English on the modern language. 

As the title indicates, this book is meant to be an introduction, and it does not presume any previous linguistic knowledge. The author’s intention is not to provide new analyses but to condense a vast amount of scholarship into a highly readable format. While some topics are discussed minimally (e.g. the standardization of Castilian is only superficially treated) and some readers may miss having a word index/glossary, the author most certainly succeeds in effectively explaining key concepts and cogently introducing many of the processes involved in the history of the Spanish language.

Reviewed by David Elton Gay, Bloomington, IN

As the back cover of the book accurately explains, this book is a collection of essays ‘concerned with assessing fictional and non-fictional written texts as linguistic evidence for earlier forms of varieties of English.’ Historical linguists of course use literary texts all of the time, but the essays in this book look more closely at the important methodological and interpretive issues involved in using literary texts than most books on historical linguistics or the history of English.

The book opens with two essays that focus on Early Modern English. In ‘Linguistic evaluation of earlier texts’ Raymond Hickey examines, among other topics, the question of Standard English in regard to studying earlier English and the representation of dialect in writing. Standard English is a product of the eighteenth century, yet it is often—and misleadingly—used to evaluate forms encountered in earlier English. Claudia Claridge and Merja Kytö’s ‘Non-standard language in earlier English’ examines standard and non-standard forms of English in Early Modern English. They observe that ‘finding evidence of non-standard…is…not an easy undertaking.’ (35) This essay is better read, however, as a study of the emerging standard and its relationship to other forms of English.

Philip Durkin’s essay, which follows, ‘Assessing non-standard writing in lexicography’ looks at ‘the treatment of non-standard and regional varieties of English in historical dictionaries, especially the OED.’ (43) His essay offers a useful description of ‘the OED’s policy decision in dealing with written evidence for non-standard varieties [of English].’ (57)

The essays that follow concentrate on different regional varieties of English, beginning with a group of essays on forms of English found in the British Isles. Katie Wales covers Northern English in writing between the years 1500–1900. Gunnel Melchers describes Southern English in writing during the same period. J. Derrick McClure’s essay describes attitudes towards early modern and modern Scots, followed by an essay called ‘Irish English in early modern drama: The birth of a linguistic stereotype’ by Raymond Hickey. An essay on British Isles English by Kevin McCafferty rounds out this regional grouping.

The following essays take on forms of English found outside of the British Isles, beginning with Lisa Cohen Minnick’s essay ‘Dialect literature and English in the USA: Standardization and national linguistic identity’. Stefan Dollinger then looks at written sources for Canadian English, with special reference to ‘[p]honetic reconstruction and the low-back vowel merger’ (197). Bettina Migge and Susanne Mühleisen offer a survey of ‘research on early written texts in the Anglophone Caribbean and…a critical look at the theories and methods employed to study the texts’ (223) in their essay. Daniel Schreier and Laura Wright describe the sources for the earliest St Helenian English in writing. The following essay, ‘An abundant harvest to the philologer?’, by Lucia Siebers, describes the sources, and problems with the sources, for early South African English. Kate Burridge then looks at the sources for early Australian English in her essay ‘A peculiar language: Linguistic evidence for early Australian English’. In the book’s final essay, Elizabeth Gordon examines the sources for early New Zealand English.

This is an excellent collection of essays on the problems and methods in using literary and other written works as historical evidence of dialect and non-standard forms in English.

Reviewed by Zhen-qiang Fan, Zhejiang Gongshang University

This book includes articles presented at the Second International Conference of the German Cognitive Linguistics Association held in October, 2006, with some articles later solicited. Drawing on three key theories in cognitive semantics—conceptual metaphor theory, conceptual metonymy theory, and conceptual blending theory—the articles in this book address the dialectical relationship between language and cognition. That is, the former can serve as a window to the latter while the latter can explain the structure and use of the former.

This book begins with an introduction, followed by three parts (‘Metaphor and metonymy: Fundamental issues’, ‘Metaphor and metonymy: Usage-based investigations’, and ‘Conceptual Blending’), each containing four articles, and ends with an index. In their introduction, Sandra Handl and Hans-Jörg Schmid introduce some essential background knowledge of metaphor, metonymy, and conceptual blending, and offer a preview of the articles in the volume.

Part 1 begins with an article by Zoltán Kövecses, in which he defends conceptual metaphor theory by meeting three challenges pertaining to methodological issues. He suggests that different approaches should complement each other and neither one alone can solve such complex phenomenon as metaphor. Dmitrij Dobrovol’skij examines the semantic analyzability of idioms and their discursive behavior, demonstrating how cognitive studies can contribute to description of the semantics and syntax of idioms. Aivars Glaznieks’ experiment shows that, contrary to what cognitive linguistics would predict, participants show little reliance on source domains in the acquisition and comprehension of metaphors. With a corpus study, Sandra Handl complements ontology-based theories by incorporating attribute salience to account for the conventionality of metonymy.

Based on naturally occurring data in corpora, the articles in Part 2 investigate metaphors used in specific discourses or language structure. Brigitte Nerlich scrutinizes metaphor scenarios in print media in the United Kingdom and illustrates their effectiveness for strategic purposes in disease management discourses. Monica Petrica presents a close comparison of Maltese and German discourse in the European Union, stressing the important role of culture in discursive metaphors. Focusing on United States presidential speeches, Kathleen Ahrens puts forward a method for identifying and testing metaphorical cognitive models through an analysis of lexical frequency patterns in small well-defined corpora. Beate Hampe explains causative resultatives with reference to metaphor and construction grammar.

The first article in Part 3 of the book, by Hans-Jörg Schmid, tests the predictions made by conceptual blending theory concerning the understanding of novel compounds. It argues for utilizing a simplified version of optimal relevance from cognitive pragmatics to refine the relevance principle, which is unspecified in Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner’s model. Through an in-depth analysis of ‘sandwich generation’ and ‘flame sandwich’, Réka Benczes demonstrates the advantage and suitability of blending theory for the analysis of metaphorical compounds. Explanatory power can also be seen in Elena Tribushinina’s article: she accounts for noun modification by predicting adjectives. Finally, Siaohui Kok and Wolfram Bublitz employ conceptual blending theory to explain the pragmatic notions of evaluation/stance and common ground, demonstrating the cross-fertilization of cognitive linguistics and pragmatics.

Reviewed by Fan Zhen-qiang, Zhejiang Gongshang University

This volume includes articles presented at the sixth International Workshop on Multidisciplinary Approaches to Discourse in Chorin, Germany, in 2005, whose theme was salience in discourse. The collection begins with the editors’ introduction, which sets the scene for the chapters that follow by providing state of the art research and a snapshot of the following chapters.

Focusing on salience of discourse entities, Part 1 begins with Olga Krasavina’s study, which addresses the connection between salience demonstratives in Russian. Using corpus and experimental methods, she discovers that the former plays a limited role in the discursive use of the latter. Andrey Y. Filchenko analyzes certain grammatical constructions in an indigenous language in North Siberia, stressing that discourse salience is gradient, dynamic, and sensitive to cultural context. Through corpus analysis, Ralph L. Rose examines the influence of syntactic and semantic factors on pronominal reference and suggests that the combination of both syntactic and semantic information will result in greater predictive power for the salience of discourse referents. Part 1 concludes with Christian Chiarcos’s introduction of the mental salience framework, a salience-based computational framework for the context-adequate generation of referring expressions in discourse. On this basis, the author proposes a parameterized framework as architecture for handling cognitive-pragmatic mechanisms of attention control in discourse.

Part 2 contains two chapters extending salience beyond entities in discourse (to discourse relations or rhetorical relations) with evidence from crosslinguistic comparison and from diachronic language change, respectively. By comparing coordination markers in Norwegian, German, and English, Wiebke Ramm challenges the universality of discourse relations and demonstrates that the linguistic manifestations of salience are varied and display crosslinguistic variation. Drawing on a corpus of Old High German, Roland Hinterhölzl and Svetlana Petrova reveal that in the earliest development of German, verb placement was governed by and sensitive to salient-related pragmatic factors as well as discourse-structural factors.

The three contributions in Part 3 address extra-linguistic salience. John D. Kelleher’s article proposes a framework for reference resolution in visually situated dialogs, exploiting a weighted integration of both linguistic and visual salience scores to rank the potential referents located in the multimodal situation. Building on centering theory, Birgitta Bexten puts forward a model for a sufficient description of plurilinear hypertext, integrating not only linguistic salience but also non-linguistic paratextually marked salience. Finally, with empirical support, Berry Claus presents a simulation approach to text comprehension and its implications for non-linguistic salience. This approach claims that language comprehension is achieved by mentally simulating what is being described in a text; thus, in this approach, which entities are being simulated and how they are recaptured in the simulation will affect the salience of referents.

Produced by scholars with a wide range of research backgrounds, the articles in this book represent multidisciplinary and multidimensional research on salience in discourse or beyond discourse to include non-linguistic aspects.

Reviewed by Fan Zhen-qiang, Zhejiang Gongshang University

This book contains papers presented at a theme session of the tenth International Cognitive Linguistics Conference (Cracow, Poland, 2007), with some additionally solicited articles from leading metonymy experts. Tackling essential issues of metonymy and with original approach, the book focuses on ‘(i) delimiting the notion of metonymy…, (ii) clarifying the points of divergence between the various contributors with respect to this notion, and (iii) suggesting a consensus view which will hopefully have reverberations in both the Cognitive Linguistics community and the linguistics community at large’ (3).

Following an introduction by the editors, which provides the background, aim, and structure of the book, a contribution by Antonio Barcelona critically reviews a number of controversial issues in the metonymy research arena, elaborates his own prototype-based redefinition and classification of metonymy, and discusses the distinction between metonymy and metaphor.

Part 1 of the book addresses metonymy and related semantic and rhetorical issues. It begins with a chapter by Carita Paradis, devoted to the relevance of metonymy to explaining the mechanisms of how lexical items activate and/or acquire new meanings. Specifically, the chapter focuses on two key mechanisms: metonymization and zone activation. Both are construals involving PART-WHOLE configurations, and the difference between them is that the former operates between senses, while the latter operates within senses. Dirk Geeraerts and Yves Peirsman clarify the terminological confusion between metonymy, profile/zone discrepancy, and facetization. Through syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic analysis, they conclude that facetization is a special type of metonymy in that it involves reference shift, a feature which is lacking in zone activation and thus renders it non-metonymical. Francisco José Ruiz de Mendoza Ibáñez argues that facetization and zone activation are two processes of domain reduction, which is one of the two content operations of metonymy, the other one being domain expansion. In revealing the cognitive mechanism of vertical polysemy, Anu Koskela distinguishes category broadening and narrowing from metonymy based on the fact that, besides involving different domain structures, the latter involves a shift in the salience of domains while the former does not.

The final two chapters of Part 1 apply metonymy to the analysis of complex tropes: Tanja Gradečak-Erdeljić and Goran Milić explore metonymic inference and pragmatic functions of euphemisms and dysphemisms in political discourse; and Javier Herrero Ruiz analyzes more tropes such as irony, oxymoron, overstatement, and understatement, repositioning them as idealized cognitive models and examining how their construction and interpretation rely on the operation of metonymy.

The chapters in Part 2 treat metonymy or metonymic chains as operations in domain networks/matrices. This argument is confirmed in the chapter by Réka Benczes, where he draws evidence from compounds. Rita Brdar-Szabó and Mario Brdar point out that metonymy should be viewed as ‘a discourse-driven inference or pragmatic function….arising in the course of domain expansion or reduction’ (245) instead of mapping. Focusing on indirect speech acts, Xianglan Chen refines the notion of domain matrix by proposing a more dynamic model, incorporating metonymic triggers such as our background knowledge, the immediate context, and individual pragmatic factors.

Reviewed by Abhishek Kumar Kashyap, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University

This book adds to the existing literature on the theoretical, empirical, and descriptive understanding of parts of speech (PoS). The book is comprised of twelve chapters, an introductory chapter, and eleven empirical studies, organized thematically. In the first chapter, the editors give a very brief introduction to the characteristic features of PoS, which stands as an overview of forthcoming chapters.

The following three chapters bear strong theoretical implications. In Ch. 2, Waldemar Schwager and Ulrike Zeshan propose semantic and structural criteria for identifying word classes in two different sign languages: German sign language and Kata Kolok, the sign language of a village in Bali. They examine the theoretical implication of previous works on the PoS system in sign languages and present an analysis of PoS in target sign languages. In Ch. 3, Christian Lehmann compares the roots and stems in a sample of six languages (English, German, Latin, Spanish, Yucatec Maya, and Mandarin Chinese) and makes a strong theoretical statement against the universality of the category of roots, arguing that the preconception of the categories as universal is a misleading approach. In Ch. 4, Walter Bisang presents a case against the universality of PoS in the Late Archaic Chinese (LAT) lexicon. Based on certain structural-conceptual and methodological criteria, he shows that LAT is a ‘precategorial’ language: formal lexical categories like noun and verb can be determined by the participant structure interpreted only in a full sentence.

Mark Donohue, in Ch. 5, and Yulia Koloskova and Toshio Ohori, in Ch. 6, show the split status of a common formal category, adjective, in Tukang Besi, an Austronesian language of Indonesia, and in the Miyako-Hirara dialect of Ryukyuan (Japan), respectively. In a similar vein, in Ch. 7 David Gil looks at the acquisition of categories by children in the Jakarta dialect of Indonesian where only two categories, noun and verb, can be distinguished. The following two chapters examine the noun. In Ch. 8, Jan Don and Marian Erkelens report an experiment on adult native speakers of Dutch to show that a native speaker is able to categorize the words of his or her language on the basis of phonological information. Lynn Nichols, in Ch. 9, presents a case of lexical borrowing in Zuni, a language spoken in the southwestern region of the United States, to show the grammatical complexity of nouns roots in the language that pose constraints on borrowability.

The final three chapters investigate the nature of PoS within the approach known as the Amsterdam model. In Ch. 10, Ventura Salazar-Garcia evaluates the model, arguing for a constituent-based taxonomy of PoS, first applying the analysis to Spanish quantifiers and then to ‘degree words’ expressing intensification in other modern Romance languages. In Ch. 11, Jan Rijkhoff discusses the dichotomy of flexible versus rigid classification of PoS and proposes that rather than one unified category of noun, there can be at least four subsets based on semantic and syntactic criteria. In the final chapter, Kees Hengeveld and Eva van Lier use the theoretical framework, discourse functional grammar, to compare the correlation between lexical and clausal constructs in a sample of twenty-three languages.

This volume crosslinguistically casts fresh light on the oversimplification of PoS. It will be a useful resource for linguists, researchers, and anyone interested in understanding grammar.

Reviewed by Marián Sloboda, Charles University

This book suitably complements a number of handbooks dealing with bi- and multilingualism that are currently on the market. It is a guide, rather than a handbook, in the true sense of the word. It is characterized by a didactic style of writing and chapters include summaries of the main ideas, concluding with often annotated or sorted references to other literature and electronic sources, including software.

In seventeen of total twenty-two chapters, the book guides the reader through a number of methodological questions, research methods, and theoretical approaches. On one hand, the book includes chapters presenting very basic methodological issues, such as types and sources of data, selection of subjects and sites, and various data collection tools (e.g. laboratory designs, questionnaires, and audio/video recording). On the other hand, there, also, are chapters presenting particular theoretical approaches and concepts, including critical discourse analysis, conversation analysis, and social networks.

The reader should not expect detailed instructions for how to proceed in doing research, though the text on the back cover may give such an impression. Most chapters provide an outline of an approach or methodology. More detailed descriptions of methods can be reached following the references. From this book, the reader can expect to receive a basic idea and understanding of research methods and of various approaches, as well as types of research questions characteristic of each approach.

Some chapters reflect the individual inclinations of their authors more than others, such as the chapter on transcription which is devoted to only one transcription system. In addition to the seventeen chapters on research methodology and theoretical approaches, the book also includes two introductory and three concluding chapters. Student readers may particularly appreciate the three short, but very helpful, concluding chapters concerning project ideas, dissemination of research, and resources, including information about academic journals and publications, conferences, software tools, websites, and mailing lists.

Although this book is not rich in detail, it is certainly large in scope, covering a range of topics from neurolinguistic research to statistic analyses to ethnography. The book will be welcomed not only by students, but it may also be of interest to scholars who might, for example, if doing research focused on a particular aspect of bi- or multilingualism (e.g. on the social aspect), want to explore neurolinguistic or other approaches to the topic.

Reviewed by Nadia Mifka-Profizic, University of Auckland

The idea of change being central to the universe is not a new one. In ancient times, for example, the Greek philosopher Heraclitus argued that nothing endures but change. The idea has been present ever since, but it received a new impetus and theoretical elaboration in the development of dynamic or complex adaptive systems theory (DST). Recent years have seen strong support for DST in the field of applied linguistics.

This book is a logical continuation of proposals by a group of researchers who view language as a constantly changing, evolving complex system. The book is broadly organized into three parts. The first part is concerned with the theory, the second part considers case studies guided by DST, and the third part presents a detailed description of the methods and techniques used in empirical studies reported in previous chapters.

Ch. 1, contributed by Kees De Bot and Diane Larsen-Freeman, serves as an introduction to DST and explains the differences between research from a DST perspective and traditional accounts of language acquisition. In Ch. 2, Marjolijn H. Verspoor and Heike Behrens explore the compatibility of DST with the usage-based approaches, making a clear case for bottom-up processes and the non-linearity of language development.

Chs. 3 through 6 consider the application of DST in empirical research. Each chapter presents an exploratory study, with references to the final chapter, ‘How to sections’ so that interested researchers and students can immediately learn how particular data have been obtained and analyzed. In Ch. 3, Monika Schmid, Marjolijn H. Verspoor, and Brian MacWhinney explore the ways of coding and analyzing data with a focus on language development over time.

The following chapter, by Marijn van Dijk, Marjolijn H. Verspoor, and Wander Lowie, deals with variability both at the inter-learner and intra-learner levels. The authors emphasize the idea that developmental and longitudinal data can bring about clearer and more realistic patterns of individual language development. In Ch. 5, Marjolijn H. Verspoor and Marijn van Dijk explain the process of variable selection in order to submit data to a model simulation.

In Ch. 6, Wander Lowie, Tal Caspi, Paul van Geert, and Henderien Steenbeek consider the final stage in research from the DST perspective–the simulation of models used to test the theoretical hypotheses. In short, the models used in a DST approach are dynamic, non-linear, and stochastic, clearly distinguished from traditional static, linear, and deterministic models. The final chapter, ‘How to sections’, by Marjolijn H. Verspoor, Wander Lowie, Paul van Geert, Marijn van Dijk, and Monika S. Schmid provides detailed descriptions of each method, including step-by-step instructions related to the analyses and calculation, and references to the web page containing the files used in the analyses.

Overall, the book offers a comprehensive account of the concepts, empirical research, and practical advice on how to analyze the data from a dynamic perspective, and is a worthwhile contribution to language development research.

Reviewed by Irene Theodoropoulou, Qatar University

This textbook introduces topics concerning formal and functional variation in English. The first chapter discusses the notion ‘English’ and argues for a social rather than a mental treatment of the term, while underscoring the different degrees of standardizability between languages and dialects and between spoken and written language. Ch. 2 considers how speakers of English varieties can be categorized and claims that the only stable boundaries among communities, networks, and individuals are social (socially unique speakers) and linguistic (linguistically unique knowledge of language).

Ch. 3 focuses on the role of English in two types of language planning, status planning, and corpus planning, in England, Kenya, Sri Lanka, and the European Union, and it illustrates how some factors (e.g. prestige, power) remain constant, while some others (e.g. sociopolitical circumstances) vary. Regional and social variation in contemporary English are taken up in Ch. 4. The author maintains that these two types of variation go hand in hand when it comes to the emergence of new, non-local, non-standard forms of the language. In Ch. 5, the author looks into change in English and, through the consideration of studies from urban and rural contexts, makes the claim that a change in a particular variety materializes when used by particular speakers in specific contexts for particular communicative purposes.

Ch. 6 offers an overview of English historical sociolinguistics, whereby demythologizing the idea of pure English by illustrating how English is a mongrel language in all its historical periods up to date. Ch. 7 is concerned with English language contact with other languages. Along with coverage of English-lexifier pidgins and creoles and code-switching, the chapter also discusses English as a global language. Ch. 8 discusses dialect contact in and beyond Britain and argues that heterogeneity of speech communities entails the diffuseness of linguistic forms in contact, while their cohesion leads to levelling and standardization, and thus to the reduction of linguistic variation. In Ch. 9, the possibility of explaining sociolinguistic variation in English using the modular approach and the usage-based model, namely through analytical tools drawn from theoretical linguistics, is discussed.

Finally, Ch. 10 summarizes the main themes covered in the book by highlighting two significant issues: (i) the arbitrariness of the form-function distinction in variation in English, and (ii) the challenging need to think about potential (analytical) ways to link the sociolinguistics of contemporary English-speaking societies with the sociolinguistic state of affairs of those in the past and the ways that varieties of English are used in diverse contexts.

Due to the repetitiveness of the concluding chapter, it may have been more fitting for Chs. 9 and 10 to be clustered together as a concluding discussion of how theoretical linguistics can inform the description and interpretation of the topics covered in the book. Overall, however, the book is very accessible and offers a brief and concise introduction to the sociolinguistics of English, which will appeal to students and scholars alike who are interested in the sociolinguistics of the English language.

Reviewed by Nadia Mifka-Profozic, University of Auckland

Corrective or negative feedback is, undoubtedly, a persisting concern of language teaching practitioners. The question of whether learner errors should be corrected or not has never been an easy one to answer. From a theoretical perspective, negative feedback has been discussed in relation to the ‘logical problem’ of language acquisition and the issue of positive and negative evidence in the process of acquiring language. In this book, the author explores the various aspects of corrective feedback (CF) in a classroom setting, aiming to reveal the complex relationships between individual learner characteristics and the interaction taking place in the classroom. The book draws on the author’s Ph.D. thesis but has outgrown the limits of its primary purpose with the addition of new chapters and with extended discussion. Particular attention is paid to two types of CF: recasts as implicit CF versus explicit correction in oral form, and direct correction versus metalinguistic explanation in written form.

The book consists of eight chapters, including discussion of both oral and written CF and a comparison between the two. The first chapter introduces the topic and explains the key terms and issues related to CF. Ch. 2, ‘Theoretical perspectives on CF’, provides an overview of theoretical accounts from which CF has been approached and discussed. The central part of the chapter introduces cognitive theories of oral CF, involving the interaction hypothesis and the noticing hypothesis, which explain some of the key constructs in language acquisition. Ch. 3, ‘Pedagogical perspectives on CF’, explores a range of pedagogical and methodological questions related to oral and written error correction. Some of the controversial issues concerning written grammar correction are discussed in this chapter. Pointing to the problem of overcorrection, the author aims at providing guidelines for teachers, drawing on a range of different sources, including methodologists’ recommendations and observed practices as well as teachers’ and students’ beliefs regarding error correction.

Ch. 4, ‘Oral corrective feedback research’, and Ch. 5, ‘Written corrective feedback research’ both deal with the author’s experimental work carried out in English as a second language (ESL) classrooms. This involves a brief review of most influential studies to date that have investigated the effectiveness of CF, including a detailed description of the author’s methodology and the results obtained in oral and written experimental studies. Ch. 6, ‘Comparing oral and written corrective feedback’, compares the effectiveness of CF in two different modes so that direct correction in writing and recasts are compared to metalinguistic explanation and explicit oral correction. Ch. 7, ‘Individual differences and corrective feedback’, investigates the role of individual factors in mediating the effects of CF. The author focuses on analytic ability as a component of language aptitude, on learner attitudes towards correction, and on language learning anxiety. In the concluding chapter, the significance of the book is emphasized and pedagogical recommendations are provided, so that research on CF can be made relevant for language teachers.