Bernard Dov Spolsky is certainly deserving of a festschrift honoring his work: His career, which has taken him from New Zealand to Australia, to Israel, and to Canada and the United States, and back again to Israel, is one that has made a huge impact on the field of educational linguistics broadly conceived. His work includes major contributions with respect to Maori and Navajo educational programs, bilingual education in North America, and issues related to language policy studies and minority language education around the world. His commitment to issues of social justice and equity is well known and well articulated in his work and in his life, and this commitment is also clearly reflected in the contributions to this volume.

This festschrift contains 15 contributions, divided into four sections dealing with: (a) language teaching, language learning, and literacy; (b) language testing in educational contexts; (c) multilingualism, minority language, and language planning; and (d) case studies in educational linguistics. All the chapters are well written and interesting, which is hardly surprising given the contributors, who include such noted figures as E. Bialystok, K. de Bot, M. Clyne, A. Cohen, J. Fishman, N. Hornberger, R. Lambert, J. LoBianco, E. Shohamy, and C. Bratt Paulston. Although it is obviously not possible to provide a discussion of all the contributions in the space available, three of the chapters deserve special mention.

The book begins with a powerful chapter by Widdowson entitled “The Monolingual Teaching and Bilingual Learning of English.” The separation of second language (L2) teaching from L2 learning, as Widdowson compellingly notes, is a strange one that needs to be addressed:

The recognition of this puzzle is, Widdowson argues, an important step in the process of advocating a bilingual approach to language teaching that provides a foundation for a more critical approach to language teaching in general and to English language teaching in particular.

E. Shohamy, one of the co-editors of the festschrift, is also the author of a chapter entitled “The Social Responsibility of Language Educators.” The chapter, in essence, is concerned with discussing “the role of the tester, given the powerful uses of tests in society as tools for mostly political, social, educational, and ideological agendas” (p. 114). This is both a timely and important topic, and one that needs to be addressed more thoughtfully, fully, and cogently by all those involved in the language teaching profession. Shohamy's chapter is a valuable introduction to the issues and the nature of the debate, although the extent to which the debate about testing is itself “relatively new” (p. 124), as she argues, is perhaps debatable. The inclusion of the Code of Ethics of the International Language Testing Association (as an appendix) is an especially helpful addition to the chapter.

The final chapter, by N. Hornberger, is a fascinating state-of-the-art analysis of educational linguistics as a field of study, using the University of Pennsylvania program as a case study. An important theme in this chapter is the development of educational linguistics and its relationship to applied linguistics in a broader perspective. Although the two are closely related and certainly overlap in many ways, Hornberger argues:

New perspectives and issues in educational language policy is, in short, an important and timely contribution to the field of educational linguistics and an admirable tribute to Spolsky's life and work.