As a rejoinder to Chomsky’s strong claim that language is an innate faculty, the volume under review is structured into parts A, B and C (“Introduction,” Extension,” and “Exploration”) plus a preface, providing a platform for readers to know about, to think along with great minds about, and to inquire on their own about the social nature of language and interaction. The nine topics introduced in the nine units of Part A, serving as foundation, are repeated respectively in Parts B and C with gradually increasing depth. The preface summarizes the main ideas of the book, traces the origin of the core concept of “discursive practice,” and advises how to use this book.

Unit A1, “Language and social interaction,” opens with the claim that the study of how an individual speaker uses language at a definite time in a particular place with other unique individuals for some specific purpose has been extensively investigated less than the study of language as a self-contained system independent of the context in which it functions (p. 4). The importance of the former is illustrated further by the theories advanced by Bakhtin and Wittgenstein. Microethnography and conversation analysis (CA) are listed as approaches to the analysis of talk-in-interaction. Unit A2, “Talk in context,” sketches the relationship between language and context, between utterance and beliefs, and between talk in the present moment and talk in the past. Unit A3, “Interaction resources,” includes both linguistic and interactional resources. Systemic Functional Grammar and CA are outlined as two methodologies for interpreting how participants exploit these resources to construct meaning and identities. Unit A4, “Discursive practice,” explores the roots of Practice Theory and brings in concepts like membership in social groups and power to reflect on the connection between social activities and language use. Unit A5, “Describing discursive practices,” makes it clear that discursive practice can be shaped, modified, and changed by identity, linguistic, and interactional resources that participants resort to. Unit A6 distinguishes interactional competence from linguistic and communicative competence in the sense that the former underscores what a person does together with others rather than what she or he knows: It presupposes intersubjectivity. Unit A7, “Talk and identity,” highlights the formation and reformation of identity in interaction. Unit A8, “Community and communities,” features the collaborative construction of discourse by coordinating individual members’ interactional, linguistic, and nonverbal resources. Unit A9, “Developing skills in social interaction,” views learning as both a social and a cognitive process.

Part B units guide readers to identify how the production of interaction is woven into social reality through detailed theoretical analysis from an interdisciplinary perspective. Part C units invite readers to do their own discourse analysis with the help of the author’s guided questions. Revealed in a continuum throughout the book is an internal logic based on the evolving process of the social construction of language use and language learning. The reader-friendly nature of this volume is evident in its organization, which is consistent with that of other textbooks in the Routledge Applied Linguistics series. It achieves its aim in “hon[ing readers’] research skills both in the field and in the library” (xix).