Book Reviews

148

use in the classroom. Finally, Rothman and Niño-Murcia’s account of three boys
growing up in a trilingual (Spanish, Italian, and English) household in California
provides an intriguing account of how linguistic choices are shaped by children’s
developing multilingual and multicultural identities.

A potential source of confusion is the vague and inconsistent uses of the term

identity both within and across these studies. Some researchers use the term to
refer to how individuals identify themselves and how this self-identifi cation
shapes or is shaped by language choice (e.g., Bustamante-López), whereas
others use it to refer to how certain linguistic features serve as a means for
others to identify the users as, for example, so-called Haitianized (i.e., black and
poor) speakers of Dominican Spanish (Bullock and Toribio). Moreover, although
the introductory chapters (Zentella; Niño-Murcia and Rothman) emphasize the
dynamic and performative nature of identity, this theme is taken up directly in
only a handful of studies, and, with a few exceptions (e.g., Zavala and Bariola;
Rothman and Niño-Murcia), transcripts of naturally occurring talk are not included.
This absence is particularly felt in studies such as Shenk’s, in which the children’s
use of Spanish in the classroom is noted but never actually shown. The interviews
that constitute the primary data source for many studies are usually analyzed
in terms of expressed attitudes toward a language or explicit self-identifi cation
rather than as performances of identity in and of themselves. In other words,
the focus is more on how bilinguals perceive and talk about identity rather than
on performance of identity as such.

Despite that caveat, this volume can be commended for its wide-ranging and

thoughtful examination of crucial issues such as attitudes toward nonnative,
nonstandard, or contact language varieties that have relevance beyond the
Spanish-speaking world. As such, it makes a worthy contribution to the growing
body of literature on bilingualism, language learning, and identity.

REFERENCES

Norton , B . ( 2000 ). Identity and language learning: Gender, ethnicity and educational change .

London : Longman .

Pavlenko , A. , & Lantolf , J. P . ( 2000 ). Second language learning as participation and the (re)

construction of selves . In J. P. Lantolf (Ed.), Sociocultural theory and second language
learning (pp. 155 – 177 ). Oxford : Oxford University Press .

( Received 30 April 2009 )

Debra A. Friedman

Michigan State University

doi:10.1017/S0272263109990337

LINKING UP CONTRASTIVE AND LEARNER CORPUS RESEARCH .
Gaëtenelle Gilquin , Szilivia Papp , and María Belén Díez-Bedmar (Eds.).
Amsterdam : Rodopi , 2008 . Pp. xi + 282.

This volume is a collection of conference papers on learner language from a
learner corpus research perspective. Most learner corpus research relies on
contrastive interlanguage analysis (CIA). An extension of this model is Granger’s

Book Reviews

149

( 1996 ) integrated contrastive model (ICM), which combines CIA with contras-
tive analysis. This approach is reviewed by Gilquin in the fi rst of two methodo-
logical chapters, in which she proposes a model for the detection and evaluation
of transfer, which further extends Granger’s ICM by adding a component of fi rst
language (L1)-interlanguage comparison. Corpus comparability, a crucial meth-
odological issue, is the focus of Ädel’s chapter, in which she demonstrates that
features of second language (L2) writing that have often been ascribed to lack
of register awareness may actually be due to features of task design, such as
planning and access to sources.

The remaining chapters focus on learner lexis, syntax, and discourse. Most

studies adopt the CIA or the ICM approach, and, like the case studies in Gilquin
and Ädel, are based on subcorpora of the international corpus of learner English,
a corpus of L2 English argumentative writing by university students from 25
different L1 backgrounds. In the only chapter devoted to learner lexis, Cross
and Papp compare the use of verb-plus-noun combinations in argumentative
writing by Chinese, German, and Greek L1 learners. Chinese learners were found
to be less creative and used structures that suggest reliance on memorized
chunks. Lozano and Mendikoetxea compare the production of postverbal sub-
jects in the argumentative writing of Spanish and Italian students, whereas Osborne
investigates the factors that affect adverb placement in L2 writing by postinter-
mediate learners from various L1 backgrounds. Findings revealed that adverb
placement is affected by learner L1, with speakers of verb-raising Romance lan-
guages favoring verb-adverb-object placement over speakers of Germanic and
Slavic languages. Díez-Bedmar and Papp’s study of article use in the English
writing of L1 Chinese and Spanish learners shows that Chinese learners exhibit
more nonnativelike traits than do Spanish learners. Cosme tests the hypothesis
that advanced French and Dutch learners’ underuse of participial constructions
might be due to transfer, given that French and Dutch generally use these con-
structions less than English does.

In the fi rst of three chapters on learner discourse, Callies examines raising

constructions—a topic that might be best regarded as syntax—in L2 English
writing by advanced German and Polish learners and fi nds that all types of raising
constructions are underrepresented and used in nontargetlike ways. Hannay and
Martínez Caro investigate the textual discourse competence of Spanish and
Dutch learners of English, by comparing their level of exploitation of the English
clause in the theme zone. Dutch learners at all levels appeared more sophisti-
cated in their exploitation of the thematic options of English—that is, in terms of
structural options, syntactic devices associated with them, and semantic and rhe-
torical exploitation of those options. Demol and Hadermann investigate patterns
of discourse organization in written narratives by Belgian L1 Dutch learners of
French and L1 French learners of Dutch. Adopting an ICM approach, Dutch and
French interlanguage is compared with native Dutch and French writing; discourse
organization is examined through a number of measures of syntactic complexity
(e.g., sentence length, degree of subordination vs. coordination, degree of inte-
gration of hypotactic structures). Surprisingly, the most salient differences in
discourse patterns of French and Dutch narrative writing were found in the use
of nonfi nite clauses rather than in the degree of packaging and subordination.

Overall, the contributions in this collection provide an excellent overview of

the developments of learner corpus research, a discipline that, although growing

Book Reviews

150

steadily, appears to have remained trapped in the comparative fallacy—an
approach to learner language that relies almost exclusively on notions of transfer
and underuse or overuse and on contrastive models such as CIA and ICM. This
volume will be of interest mostly to researchers interested in advanced learner
writing; more sifting and interpretation of the fi ndings seems necessary before
the implications of the research in these chapters can be fruitfully accessed by
language teachers.

REFERENCE

Granger , S . ( 1996 ). From CA to CIA and back: An integrated approach to computerized

bilingual and learner corpora . In K. Aijmer , B. Altenberg , & M. Johansson (Eds.),
Languages in contrast: Papers from a symposium on text-based cross-linguistic studies.
Lund 4–5 March 1994 (pp. 37 – 51 ). Lund, Sweden : Lund University Press .

( Received 10 May 2009 )

Federica Barbieri

Monterey Institute of International Studies

doi:10.1017/S0272263109990349

GRAMMAR ACQUISITION AND PROCESSING INSTRUCTION:
SECONDARY AND CUMULATIVE EFFECTS . Alessandro G. Benati and
James F. Lee . Clevedon, UK : Multilingual Matters , 2008 . Pp. xvi + 211.

Although extensive research on the topic of input processing has produced
many published works, this volume adds to this body of research by examining
secondary and cumulative effects of instruction, an area yet to be investigated.
Secondary effects result from transfer-of-training to a processing problem that
is similar to the primary target of instruction, whereas cumulative effects are
found when instruction affects a processing problem that differs from the
primary target of instruction: If the primary target is the French imperfect tense,
secondary effects may be observed in the French subjunctive and cumulative
effects may be observed in French causative constructions with faire “to do”
(chapter 5). After providing an overview of processing instruction as well as an
introduction to secondary and cumulative effects of instruction, Benati and Lee
report the results of three studies that have tested such effects in three dif-
ferent second languages. The authors also provide an appendix, which is a
useful tool not only to illustrate the materials used in the different studies but
also to enable readers to compare and contrast processing instruction with
traditional instruction—even if the materials for traditional instruction activ-
ities are not provided for all studies.

Graduate students who are not yet familiar with processing instruction will fi nd

chapter 1 quite accessible and informative, even if the key studies of processing
instruction are not presented in much detail and readers would need to consult
the original articles to fi nd exact results. The presentation of the studies is user-
friendly—short summaries, fi gures, and tables enable a quick glance at the content
of the chapters—in spite of quite a few unfortunate typos. There are some repeti-
tive passages, especially in the introduction of processing instruction and of the