Cohen and Macaro have crafted a well-conceived and comprehensive treatment of second-language (L2) strategies research spanning the last three decades. Consistently strong throughout, this volume has clearly benefited from a refreshingly transparent editorial process. Cohen and Macaro describe this process explicitly in the introduction, enumerating several unique contributions presented by the collection of chapters (e.g., extensive shaping of the volume’s scope and contour by all contributing authors). Indeed, the editors’ aspirations of producing a “landmark publication” (p. 1) may very well be realized with respect to the volume’s contents as well as its design.

Cohen and Macaro divide the volume into two sections, which together account for and are evidence of the vast breadth and depth of L2 strategies research, past and present. The first seven chapters focus on a wide variety of theoretical, methodological, and practical issues. Authored by recognized experts in this area, the chapters in Part 1 approach these topics from many different angles, which range from historical to definitional, critical to introspective. Oxford and Schramm (chapter 3), for example, echo recent voices (e.g., Larsen-Freeman, Reference Larsen-Freeman2007) in a sincere call to move beyond the dominantly psychological perspective taken in L2 strategies research by integrating sociocultural approaches or, ideally, adopting a novel theoretical and methodological framework that can account for all phenomena of interest. White, Schramm, and Chamot (chapter 5) provide a similarly progressive and in-depth discussion of data collection techniques and instruments, which, despite possessing a central role in all veins of empirical research, are left out of many specialized tomes. Overall, the contributors to this first part manage to not only summarize but take principled and, at times, even brave steps toward advancing theory in an area noted as being fundamentally challenged by “definitional fuzziness” (Tseng, Dörnyei, & Schmitt, 2006, p. 79).

Following previous landmark reviews of L2 strategies (e.g., Chamot, Reference Chamot2005; McDonough, Reference McDonough1995), part 2 is divided according to different skills areas. The strength of this part lies in the use of systematic reviewing in each chapter. By employing exhaustive search techniques to locate and synthesize the entire body of research on a given topic (as opposed to the more subjective procedures of traditional literature reviews), the systematic reviews conducted in part 2 contribute significantly to the comprehensibility, reliability, and objectivity of all five synthetic accounts of the L2 strategies literature. By distilling the last three decades of empirical research, these chapters make an ideal complement to the strong theoretical and methodological foci in the first half of the volume. For example, all five draw on and provide skill-specific discussions of strategy instruction, the broader issues of which are covered extensively in Rubin, Chamot, Harris, and Anderson’s chapter in part 1. Additionally, by systematically reviewing the research to date, each chapter in part 2 exposes and integrates seamlessly into the discussion a number of areas where further inquiry is needed.

Although potentially of interest and surely accessible to most L2 researchers, the intended audience of this volume is somewhat narrow. However, with a wide range of topics covered, researchers in areas tangentially related to L2 strategies (e.g., psychometrics, reading, classroom pedagogy) will find certain chapters highly relevant to their work.

Finally, although this volume is exemplary in accomplishing the task of reviewing and, at times, advancing our current understanding of L2 strategies, deviations from well-trodden paths are few. In other words, for an area of inquiry that shoulders the formidable and inherently interdisciplinary task of “identifying how learners learn” by uncovering “the interrelationship between teaching and learning” (p. 28), the contributors appear to have consulted with surprisingly little research outside the domain of what is traditionally considered applied linguistics.

There is no doubt that this unified collection of chapters has succeeded in summarizing the last 30 years of strategies research. Perhaps more importantly, however, the editors have also produced what will be regarded as a seminal volume by revealing much of what will become the research agenda in L2 strategies over the next 30 years.