This small volume makes connections relating the theory and practice of language teaching to sociopolitical and geopolitical perspectives as well as to a differentiated view of learners and teachers as individuals. The efforts are for the most part very successful, and this volume will be of interest to anyone working in research, pedagogical applications, and theory-building context and culture in language teaching and learning. Eight of the nine articles in the volume had their origin as papers presented at a conference at the University of Durham in June, 2001. The articles address two categories of inquiry: reports of empirical studies of learners, and procedural or methodological contributions with a focus on teachers and teaching.

Kramsch's contribution was written at the invitation of the editors and serves as a fine beginning for the volume. It sets the tone for the whole collection by explicating the research process of an ethnographic study of classroom discourse. Kramsch questions how students construct the foreign cultural reality and their discoursal selves. Her findings include the discovery that cultural contexts determine linguistic and organizational choices and processes in learners. She then draws implications for classroom practice that include honoring learners as creators of meaning, validating their authorial voices and intentions, and giving them a critical metalanguage to appreciate their own and other writers' resources.

Holme's contribution first outlines five views or definitions of culture and its interface with language in the classroom, with examples, based on the concept of “grammatical metaphor,” for ways that these approaches could be realized in the classroom. His main question is whether there is linguistic evidence for how culture affects the nature of language and how this effect influences classroom teaching. After a surface-level discussion of universals, he concludes that metaphors through which a culture conceptualizes reality impose themselves on the language. His final suggestion is to invite learners into the “conceptual core of a language” (p. 30). The means for realizing this suggestion remain very vague.

Fäcke's contribution is much more robust. She uses methods influenced by the ethnography of speaking and discourse and conversation analysis to accomplish introspective case studies of two German learners as they struggle to understand a complex Spanish literary text. Her findings—interesting and solid—show how readers' own autobiographic and experiential constructs influence interpretation and how the interaction of text and person can lead to new constructions of self and of meaning.

Holtzer contributes a paper describing a research project called SCOTLANG, which studies the development of L2 interactive skills and sociocultural competence among English and French native speaker university students. She reports preliminary findings that codeswitching is—not surprisingly—a major communication strategy employed by bilingual subjects. The project hopes to develop appropriate descriptors for measuring learning (“linguistic gain”). Such descriptors would improve the project as reported so far because the findings are far from new or surprising.

Halbach's paper begins the second section of the volume by discussing the lack of success of a reflective approach to teacher training for undergraduates in the Spanish environment context. She makes suggestions for raising students' awareness, using scaffolding and other well-known techniques. Her reminder that attention should be given to cultural and personal factors reiterates to a certain extent the obvious but supports the overall thesis of the volume in that way.

Decke-Cornill's and Wandel's interesting papers each call for a reconsideration of the view of the relationship between language and culture in the German education context and question the notion that learning a language is equivalent to acculturation to a foreign culture. They support the idea that a language or a cultural understanding in these contexts is cocreated by those who are learning.

The role of English in the political and social integration of Europe is discussed in Breidbach's contribution, where he continues the theme of tension between cultural and linguistic diversity and emergent social structures. He offers a good model for curriculum design meant to address these tensions.

Wendt's article concludes the volume with a broader view of theory formation for language teaching. He suggests a more vital role for qualitative research, ethnomethodology, and ethnography to answer questions about perceptions of the world and of the learner as a unique self.

In sum, this volume could have a larger impact than its brief length might imply. Its greatest strength is to underscore the importance of—and give several good or very good examples of—qualitative research and theory building that maintain the complexity and diversity surrounding inquiry of context and culture in the L2 learning arena.