What characterizes the competence of multilinguals as compared to that of bilinguals? Is their metalinguistic awareness more developed? Do they find the acquisition of a fourth or fifth language easier? Cenoz, Hufeisen, and Jessner have assembled revised papers from the 1999 International Conference on Trilingualism and Third Language Acquisition in Innsbruck to present theoretical and practical dimensions of an unexplored domain, still grounded in bilingualism studies.

The book is divided into three sections that focus on sociocultural, interlinguistic, and pedagogical issues. Hoffman's comprehensive and erudite state-of-the-art overview summarizes trilingualism studies, emphasizing the paucity of long-term, systematic studies. Following Cook (1997), she attempts to define multilingual competence, foregrounding the complexity of models of acquisition, language production, and sociocultural and psychological factors.

The first section of the book consists of Bensoussan's and Lasagabaster's chapters on learners' affect toward a third language (L3). The second section explores various aspects of L3 learning. Finger shows that learning Esperanto as a second language (L2) can enhance the learning of L3 Romance languages. Okita and Jun Hai explore how monolingual Chinese speakers and bilingual Chinese Singaporeans acquire Japanese kanji characters. Gonzalez-Ardeo focuses on how monolinguals (Spanish) and bilinguals (Basque-Spanish) learn English technical vocabulary. Gabrys explores possible interactive processes between the components of a trilingual's lexicon.

The third section of the book comprises L3 teaching methodologies and learning strategies in the studies by Aronin, Hinger, Bruno, and Laoire on an audiovisual method for improving skills of the L3 learner, intensive versus extensive L3 learning, L3 metacognitive reading awareness, and preliminary data on comparing learning strategies of balanced and L1 dominant bilinguals, respectively. Spöttl's chapter focuses on the integration of language curriculums and the special needs of L3 learners. Marx concludes the book with a short summary that emphasizes areas of interest to be further explored.

The 11 chapters of this pioneering book offer a round-the-world trip in 182 pages with stopovers at different multilingual academic institutions. Questionnaires are administered, semistructured interviews are conducted, or student subjects are observed to explore various aspects of their multilingual competence and instruction and learning strategies that could enhance it.

These research projects are conducted from diverse theoretical perspectives, ranging from Universal Grammar and contrastive studies to SLA, sociolinguistics, and psycholinguistics. In sum, in the landscape of multilingualism studies in which there are so many lacunae, such a diversity of theoretical perspectives, research objectives, and methodologies constitutes a significant contribution.

My main quibble with this book is related to the first section, which attempts to illuminate sociocultural dimensions by providing quantitative measures of affect. When reading this section, one cannot help asking an intriguing question that is absent in the book: How do multilingual selves actually fare in institutional and noninstitutional settings? To answer this question, additional theoretical frameworks such as micro discourse analysis (Scollon & Scollon, 2001) and diverse methodological tools including narrative inquiry could be used. These may further advance the complex investigation of multilingualism as it is constructed by multilingual voices (Belcher & Connor, 2001).