Scholars and students of applied linguistics will welcome this new volume for its comprehensive presentation of studies significant to both sociolinguistics and SLA. Its recognition of burgeoning research areas, including the acquisition of sociolinguistic competence and formulaic sequences, is laudable. The teaching of nonstandard varieties is also discussed within an exploration of the concept of communicative competence and speaker identity and style.
The notion of variation in native- and nonnative-speaker output is approached from a number of angles. Two of the volume’s chapters were authored in collaboration with Regan and Berlin, respectively. The book begins with an introduction to variation theory, which takes the reader through a summative (albeit dense) history, and describes the Varbrul program via variable rules in the context of /t, d/ deletion in African American English. The thorough detail with which this work is addressed in part 1 is certainly impressive. Although brief mention of second language learning is made in the first pages of the book, readers must wait until chapter 4 for an introduction to variation in nonnative speech. At this point, Adamson reveals that the book will primarily cover what Corder (Reference Corder and Andersen1981) referred to as “vertical variation.” Therefore, readers in search of a more exhaustive discussion of horizontal variation will need to seek additional sources.
In chapter 5, Berlin and Adamson present their own study on the acquisition of English irregular past tense by Chinese-speaking children. Students may find this chapter helpful because of its more detailed explanations on steps in data analysis and interpretation of results. However, this book should not be mistaken for a how-to text on data analysis in variation research because Adamson picks up the pace rather quickly in his discussion of variation from a theoretical perspective.
Connectionist networks are rightly represented as probabilistic mechanisms, and it is sentence production models like that of Barsalou (Reference Barsalou1992) that Adamson suggests as possible tools for understanding basic frequencies of variation in output. Beyond connectionism, cognitive linguistics offers a competence-based grammatical theory that may be of even more use to variationists. Within this framework, a case is made for linking prototype schemas in morphology with variation in speech and grammaticality judgments, using slink, slunk, slinked, and slunked as examples. Mention of research on morphological variability in second language oral production, which has tentatively referenced performance-based explanations (Prévost & White, Reference Prévost and White2000), is missing from this discussion.
Through his pedagogical lens, Adamson next seeks to distill a few concepts revealed by research in both native and nonnative speech. Readers will appreciate his nuanced explanation of monitoring from the standpoint of both Labov and Krashen. As accommodation theory, style shifting, and self-identification are reviewed, the concept of monitoring as attention paid to speech is a noticeable undercurrent.
Implications for teaching are explored in the book’s final chapter. Growing debate on the teaching of nonstandard varieties as part of foreign language instruction is deftly situated between discussions of efforts to aid child speakers of African American English in acquiring standard English and of the role of identity and dialect prestige in second language learning. Adamson ultimately favors an optimally responsive foreign language teaching paradigm, one that makes room for a constructivist, and experientially based, approach to learning. Further research on the teaching of formulaic sequences and constructions is advocated as a means of building further support for this teaching approach.
Given that the theoretical and pedagogical sections of this book address such different research questions, it is reasonable that instructors from a wide range of tailored courses in SLA could employ this text—although not at the introductory level. Although most chapters close with a discussion or conclusion that revisits the main ideas, readers in need of a more holistic conclusion to the text will be left wanting and should turn to the substantive preface that Adamson provides. In short, this volume makes a significant contribution to the field of SLA in its provocative outline of future research areas in interlanguage variation.
