In their introduction, Piller and Pavlenko claim that SLA research suffers from:

The book's contributors certainly address this issue directly by determinedly focusing on the female second language (L2) learner as a complex social being in a wide variety of different social contexts. However, some papers more directly address the interests of a SLA audience, whereas others will appeal more to sociolinguists and gender researchers. In this review I focus on the former.

The book is divided into three sections. The first opens with a substantial and valuable state-of-the-art review by Pavlenko and Piller that elaborates the notion of L2 learners as active agents “in charge of their own learning” rather than “passive vessels” (p. 29) and outlines the social constructionist framework that underpins the editors' conception of the field. Other papers explore ways in which gender relations constrain access to language resources by restricting women's interactional learning opportunities. Blackledge's interviews with 18 Bangladeshi mothers and 3 class teachers in Birmingham, U.K., indicate that, despite their support for their children's literacy in Bengali, the mothers' lack of English proficiency results in their being construed by their children's teachers as illiterate and incompetent, with obvious consequences for their opportunities to access the majority language and culture through contact with school. Similarly, Goldstein explores the linguistic consequences for Portuguese immigrant women workers in Toronto of the conflict between Portuguese, their language of solidarity at work, and English, the language of career opportunities. Implications highlight the teacher's role as facilitator rather than arbiter of what is taught.

The second section focuses on the detailed interactional dynamics of face-to-face conversations between multilingual participants. Pavlenko's article uses 25 written and 3 oral autobiographies to explore how successful SLA often entails questioning accepted gender ideologies and transforming one's linguistic gender performance to fit the target culture. By contrast, Teutsch-Dwyer's 14-month case study of a male Polish-American immigrant and the expressions of temporal references in his English illustrates how gender-identity issues result in early fossilizations (see Schmidt & Frota, 1986). She concludes that “despite the fact that this learner had ample opportunities to engage in interactional exchanges and was exposed to comprehensible input” (p. 192), lack of corrective feedback and use of positive responses to his malformed utterances by his female interlocutors may have resulted in the stabilization of his English at a level well short of adequate proficiency from the perspective of his employment opportunities. Ohara's paper highlights the relevance of prosody for women learning Japanese. Her experimental tasks demonstrate different reactions to the high pitch considered appropriate in the language of Japanese women. Moreover, speakers of L2 Japanese who retained lower pitch tended to have critical views of Japanese gender stereotypes and to reject the associated patriarchal values. Sounding nativelike is clearly not a desirable goal for female learners with such views.

Two of the three papers in the third section examine how the construction of gender identity in educational contexts disadvantages female L2 learners by providing gendered access to educational opportunities (Heller) or by presenting limiting gendered representations in teaching materials (Kramsch & von Hoene). The third paper, a detailed analysis of just one feminist ESL class (McMahill), exemplifies Japanese learners exploring gender issues in English. Although one might have expected this section to be of most direct relevance to teachers, these three papers are in fact more oriented to gender analysis than SLA.

In summary, this collection makes a good case for attending to the issue of gender-blindness in SLA research. Different papers emphasize the need for language teachers to be sensitive to the pervasive sociocultural influences (including gender) on (especially female) learners' motivations and their realistic proficiency goals and also to recognize the limits of what they have a right to demand, as well as the extent of learners' autonomy over the kind of gender identity they wish to construct or express in their L2. Although they may not be unfamiliar, these important caveats are revitalized by the immediacy and impact of some of the material analyzed in this collection.