Metaphor awareness and vocabulary retention, the focus of this volume, are two important aspects of vocabulary teaching. This book, which appears to have been inspired by Lakoff’s (e.g., Reference Lakoff1987) work, has two main sections: “Refining the Empirical Evidence” and “Broadening the Scope,” followed by a short closing chapter that focuses on classroom activities.

As it is impossible to do justice to the 17 individual authors’ research, Skoufaki’s chapter, “Conceptual Metaphoric Meaning Clues in Two Idiom Presentation Methods,” is selected as a prototypical contribution from Part 1. This chapter is characterized by an extremely focused, small-scale, and carefully designed study. A marker of high quality is the author’s insightful discussion of alternative explanations of her findings. However, better use could have been made of the literature on word guessing studies; for instance, recent Canadian research on lexical inferencing could have been discussed. An illustrative example from Part 2 is the comprehensive and valuable contribution by Verspoor on bilingual word associations, which, apart from taking in theories of the mental lexicon, also includes empirical investigations as well as suggestions for pedagogical practice.

The particular strength of this book is that it takes vocabulary teaching seriously. It may therefore seem unfair to criticize it for lack of depth when dealing with vocabulary learning issues: In the editors’ opening chapter, for instance, retention issues are largely restricted to mnemonic procedures.

This volume, one in a series of applications of cognitive linguistics, revolves around the importance of figurative thought and linguistic iconicity for vocabulary acquisition. Being mainly devoted to phraseology, it is an important contribution to an area in need of attention. For this reason alone, it is a useful resource for SLA researchers—in particular, for those involved in the training of language teachers.