SLA research, as a field, has tended toward studies that include participants who, although from different regions of the world and at various stages in their interlanguage, are nevertheless literate in their first language (L1), an argument that serves as the rationale for Tarone, Bigelow, and Hansen’s study that considers how L1 literacy impacts oracy in a second language (L2). This text pushes the boundaries of SLA research by combining a social justice and variationist approach (Tarone, Reference Tarone, Eckman, Highland, Lee, Milcham and Weber1995) to community-based SLA research and includes a rigorous analysis of the relationship between alphabetic literacy and oral processes.
Although the three intersecting studies described in the text are the most compelling facets of the book, it is worth noting that the literature review and the methodology are exceptionally crafted and situate their research at the nexus of a myriad of complex theories in SLA. The methodology is thoughtful, thorough, and highly sensitive to the understudied and vulnerable population with whom they conducted their research: Somali adolescent and adult immigrants living in the Cedar Riverside neighborhood in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Tarone et al. worked with 35 Somali participants and developed connections with the community.
These three interrelated studies take a variationist approach to SLA, exploring how L1 literacy impacts L2 oracy vis-à-vis three lenses: (a) noticing (Schmidt, Reference Schmidt1990), (b) recast and working memory, and (c) an analysis of grammatical forms utilized by both low and moderately literate participants. The first used spot the difference and story completion tasks to identify whether low-literate learners noticed corrective feedback of grammatical errors in comparison with moderately literate learners. Although word stress in the recast prompt seemed an important unaddressed factor in the quantitative analysis, Tarone et al. investigate this issue through a qualitative case study and find that one low-literacy participant attended to stress position more than he did the rearranging of words to create a grammatical question in English. This finding—with clear pedagogical implications—identifies a potential mismatch between the linguistic scaffolding the researcher or teacher might think the learner needs and the support the learner actually needs, given his metalinguistic knowledge and his lower literacy skills.
The second of their studies compares low and moderately literate participant responses to decontextualized (elicited-imitation) and contextualized recast tasks. Findings suggest that literacy level impacted participants’ ability to recall, and that dynamic, context-rich recast tasks increased participant recall accuracy. The final portion of the study, moreover, examines the impact of alphabetic literacy level on three oral interlanguage features: (a) selected verbal morphemes and plural markers, (b) referential expressions, and (c) dependent clauses and clauses with so. Although the research finds that participants with lower literacy used simpler grammatical forms and fewer dependent clauses, continued research is required in this vein, along with research that explores the intersection between working memory, phonological storage, and literacy level. These studies’ findings—revealing the impact of L1 literacy on oracy—emphasize the value of research conducted with participants in various natural states of acquisition, particularly given the increasing number of immigrant and refugee students in the United States with interrupted formal education.
One of the strengths of the final chapter, and the book overall, is the research team’s openness to the limitations of their research and a carefulness about overstating the importance of their findings, which undercuts their important contribution to SLA. Although they stress the importance of collecting data in situ, they do not address how to do so or how to evade expected methodological challenges. Although the final chapter describes pedagogical implications, this book does not seem directed toward teachers, as these implications are only briefly mentioned. The text would be challenging for SLA novices given its statistical and conceptual complexity. However, for the SLA scholar who strives toward “a new SLA research agenda” (p. 112), this book is a launching point that combines relevance to SLA with a charge to move toward nonlaboratory, in situ research that is attentive to how L2 and multilanguage learners use their languages in everyday interactional contexts.
