This heterogeneous collection is dedicated to the extensive contributions of van Essen to language pedagogy, among them nearly a half century of publications listed in the book's dedication. The volume comprises 25 contributions by 31 colleagues who collaborated with van Essen during the span of his career, and they are divided into four parts: the history of linguistics, essays (position papers), studies, and reports.

The four historical chapters aptly remind language professionals of the intellectual foundations of contemporary applied linguistics. The contributions of Koster and Sciarone broadly situate the volume and the field: Koster explores tensions between European philosophical views of phenomena such as language as historical, social constructs and the mentalist views characteristic of contemporary linguistics, whereas Sciarone contrasts the “old” and the “new” applied linguistics. The remaining two essays in this part focus narrowly on single individuals, Noordegraf on Hoogvliet, an early visionary in language teaching methodology, and Vonk on a review of the Austrian psychologist Bühler's antibehaviorist notions of children's intellectual development.

One simple way of looking at the daunting scope of the book's remaining three parts is the manner in and extent to which the authors engage—or, in a few cases, do not engage—with pedagogy. A cluster of provocative articles by Block, Byram, Thürmer, Candlin, Van de Craen, Deen and Hacquebord, van Lier, Mitchell and Brumfit, and Simensen offers calls for change in aspects of language teaching policy and practice, ranging from Block on the art versus the science of (language) teaching to van Lier's lucid reconsideration of the relationship between a focus on form and language awareness, and Mitchell and Brumfit's discussion of mother-tongue awareness as an underconsidered factor in curriculum design. Another tier of papers suggests more specific refinements in teaching approaches, materials, and media (curiously, only one paper, Nerbonne & Smit, acknowledges the potential impact of the Internet); papers by Medgyes, Meara and Sánchez, Bekkum and Hamburger, Goethals, and Kourago, touch on humor, vocabulary-teaching approaches, grammar reform in Modern Hebrew, learner self-correction in writing, and content-based instruction through mathematics.

Explicit implications of a final tier bear on SLA and linguistics rather than on teaching per se, although implicit implications can be derived from them. Gvishiani discusses the role of polysemy in lexical development, Berenst analyzes low literacy levels among “poorly schooled” citizens of the Dutch West Indies, and Jordens reexamines transfer and fossilization in learner varieties as factors in the rarity of native-speaker-like competence in SLA. Bastiaanse contrasts developmental patterns among aphasics and adults learning language in natural contexts, whereas Ensink and Mazeland and Abraham attain a still greater degree of specificity in reporting on discursive features involved in acquiring Dutch and German.

More wideranging than a typical festschrift, this book contains papers of interest to many language professionals, but it is most likely to complement the libraries of scholars in applied linguistics who tread the line between SLA and its application to teaching and who are interested in a kaleidoscopic view of contemporary, mostly European work in the field.