Our understanding of the nature and development of lexical knowledge in second-language (L2) learners has been significantly refined by the influential research of Meara, a pioneer in the areas of word association methodology, measurement of receptive and productive vocabulary, and computer modeling of vocabulary networks. This edited volume is a testament to his intellectual impact on the research community associated with the PhD program of the vocabulary acquisition research group at the University of Wales in Swansea. It provides an excellent introduction to the concerns, methods, findings, and active questions pursued by Meara and his colleagues by giving literature reviews for the topics addressed and by presenting new methods and findings from the contemporary work of the contributors.

Wray’s preface provides a useful overview of the PhD program that brought this community into being: a part-time, distance-learning program, whose students are usually also professionals in language education. In the introduction, Read and Nation discuss the influence of Meara’s work on the field in general and present a summary of the major strands in his research. In the first study, Shillaw addresses the question of how to estimate vocabulary size in L2 learners. He provides a history of yes/no test methodology and applies Rasch analysis to original data as a new approach to validation. The following two chapters highlight problems in the interpretation of word association data. Wilks provides evidence from a small-scale study that strongly questions the validity of group scores in word association tasks, due to significant individual variation in types of association. Although Fitzpatrick also finds a lack of homogeneity in both first-language (L1) and L2 groups, she also finds an intriguing pattern: As L2 proficiency increases, L2 word association preferences come to correlate with L1 preferences in the same individual. The chapter by Horst addresses the nature of lexical input in an intensive English language program, quantifying how many different words a learner hears in a typical day and discussing how lexical richness varies with the individual teacher and the type of instruction.

The following two chapters concern the use of dictionaries as tools of vocabulary acquisition. Nesi and Boonmoh compare the efficacy of different pocket electronic dictionaries, whereas Ronald presents a detailed qualitative study that comparatively measures the effects of repeated reading with and without dictionary consultation. Lexical environment is the theme that holds the next three chapters together. Barfield uses word association techniques to track collocational knowledge in low-intermediate learners, eliminating typical context from the cues and recovering it from the responses. Bell shows how, in the development of academic writing, some formulas gradually break up, whereas others crystallize, which raises interesting issues of the codevelopment of lexis and grammar. The well-argued chapter by Wolter presents the case for a meaning-last model of vocabulary acquisition, which turns conventional wisdom concerning stages of lexical acquisition on its head. This approach appears to be particularly insightful with regard to the nature of incidental vocabulary acquisition and the difference between receptive and productive vocabulary. The final research contribution is by Pemberton, who argues for a link between L1 reading instruction techniques and L2 listening skills, drawing on evidence of the disparity between Chinese learners of English from mainland China and from Hong Kong; only learners from the mainland had alphabetic L1 instruction as children, with apparently lasting effects on processing. The editors bring the volume to a close with a reflective summary of the contributions.

It is important to stress that this volume does not constitute an overview of research in the field more generally. It contains no reference to the several streams of L2 lexical research derived from insights in generative linguistics or conceptual semantics. There is no mention of how lexical items relate syntactically to their environment, a central concern in current research on topics such as verb alternation patterns (causatives, locatives, datives, etc.), unaccusativity, and lexical aspect. However, this volume stands as an excellent introduction to work inspired, in one way or another, by Meara and provides illuminating coverage of this particular approach to the L2 lexicon. It is well edited, with related chapters presented in proximity, and is guaranteed to raise as many questions as it answers. This is a must-read for those interested in the largely uncharted landscape of the L2 lexicon.