Research on formulaic language has advanced, proliferated, and contributed usefully to current knowledge, as attested in the recent collection of review articles in the Annual Review of Applied Linguistics (Polio, Reference Polio2012). Macqueen’s book makes a unique contribution to this area of inquiry. Elaborating on her doctoral thesis from the University of Melbourne (which received the Brumfit Award in 2011), Macqueen documents a multifaceted, longitudinal analysis of what she calls lexical trails (“all the uses of a single lexeme and its surrounding pattern/s in chronological order,” p. 100) in the written texts produced by four adult learners of English (from Chinese, Spanish, and Vietnamese backgrounds) as they progressed, over about a year, from preuniversity courses into academic courses at a university in Australia. The theoretical conceptualizations, methods of data collection, and resulting analyses are complex, meticulous, and eclectic, but they are also compelling, profound, and insightful.
Conceptually, Macqueen justifies and focuses her inquiry in a thorough review of the construct of formulaic language, usage, and learning based on prior studies of corpus, classroom, and introspective data as well as linguistic, emergentist, dynamic systems, and sociocultural theories. Methodologically, Macqueen’s research has combined multiple, complementary data sources that included comparable written compositions from the four learners at sequential intervals, interviews with them about these texts and their choices of phrases, and tailored tests following principles of dynamic assessment, incorporating Macqueen’s prior responses to and tutoring of the students’ writing. The research approach seemed to me something like an orchestrated amalgamation of the kinds of otherwise different analyses appearing in studies by Aljaafreh and Lantolf (Reference Aljaafreh and Lantolf1994), Hoey (Reference Hoey2005), and Li and Schmitt (Reference Li and Schmitt2009). Three sets of findings are presented, each supported by extensive extracts from learner data: (a) descriptions of the lexicogrammatical patterns used and accounts of how samples of these changed progressively and erratically over time; (b) analyses of the roles that Macqueen’s written feedback as tutor performed and negotiated with the learners to support these developments (interpreted following principles of dynamic assessment, e.g., Poehner & Lantolf, Reference Poehner and Lantolf2005); and (c) innovative analyses of the functions of imitation as the learners’ foundations, interpretations, rationalizations, and transformations of their learning the lexicogrammatical patterns in written academic English.
Macqueen concludes from ample, detailed microgenetic analyses that “language is patterning” (p. 278). Macqueen’s conceptualization of the language and literacy acquisition that follows from this focus on lexical strings is depicted as shifting along, and also between, (a) a linguistic continuum from grammatically driven colligation to semantically driven collocation as well as (b) a sociocognitive continuum from chunk making by association to chunk breaking by segmentation. The conclusion was elegant and satisfying, I thought, providing a useful framework for future studies of language and literacy learning—and also of teaching—from the perspective of emergentist, dynamic systems, complexity, and sociocultural theories. My one minor criticism is that the book could have benefited from a subject index to help guide readers back to, and across, the exceptionally diverse, interrelated range of theories, concepts, and research methods that feature throughout the volume.
