In this age of Internet plenty, research collections need a justification for presentation in book format. According to the editor's introduction, the main justification for Literacy and the second language learner is to provide a sampling of the range of “possible voices and possible questions that make up the broad and complex field of second language literacy study” (p. xi).

This book thus casts a wide net. Three chapters study lower levels of the perceptual sequence (e.g., orthography and writing system concerns). Everson reviews some research on second language (L2) learners learning to read Chinese and Japanese. He provides an introduction for those who know little about nonalphabetic writing systems, with a fascinating longitudinal analysis of the learning stages observed for American students of Chinese as a foreign language (FL). This study is then compared to data of Chinese and Americans learning FL Japanese.

Sparks, Schneider, and Ganschow review their ongoing program of studies on at-risk learners in FL reading. Going as far back as the 1959 Modern Language Aptitude Test, they present a well-documented case suggesting that, for some individuals, first language (L1) phonological and verbal memory deficits present handicaps in FL learning. Specifically for English speakers learning Spanish, the authors show how problems can be reduced with a Multisensory Structured Language approach.

A third, bottom-up focus on FL reading is Carreira's study of heritage language students. These American Latinos speak Spanish at home but seem unable to consciously identify stressed syllables of written words. This confusion about appropriate accentuation makes them appear less educated when writing Spanish. In a short-term training study with syllable stress exaggeration (a pedagogical approach that has helped English dyslexics), Carreira's subjects made fewer errors in identifying syllable stress in written Spanish.

Unfortunately, Carreira's title mentions the term connectionist approach without saying much about connectionist reading theories. The title and contents more fully address the remarkable gap between what heritage Spanish users can do in speaking versus their inability to access this knowledge in more reflective and monitored writing.

Clearer titles are needed elsewhere to specify the language being studied. Although Sullivan's valuable look at group and individual inference patterns (written recall vs. comprehension question) demonstrates for researchers that “the outcomes they find will be profoundly affected by the assessment tool that they choose” (p. 233), the title does not mention that the chapter focuses on FL French. Additionally, several other chapters deal only with Spanish FL learning. Brantmeier looks at background knowledge, language level, and gender factors in reading comprehension for adult FL Spanish. Cohen and Horowitz's review chapter, “What Should Teachers Know about Bilingual Learners and the Reading Process,” focuses on Spanish–English bilinguals. Further, this title belies its tentative contents: Cohen and Horowitz do not review reading processes as a whole but instead focus only on these processes in the context of research on bilinguals. Therefore, conclusions are preliminary, and it is unclear whether the title should read consider instead of know.

The scope widens with Lionas, who includes French, Spanish, and German in studying advanced learners' idiom detection, measuring readers' comprehension and analyzing self-reports on their thinking processes. Such quantitative and qualitative analyses offer valuable insight into FL idiom processing. Nevertheless, other writing systems—Arabic, which requires vowel inference, or Chinese or Japanese, which require word boundaries to be determined by the reader's chunking—may offer other hurdles for idiom detection.

Clearly, literacy studies must cast a wide net. This collection looks beyond FL students to FL teachers' belief in the importance of reading, a belief directly in contrast with their neglect of reading in practice (Gebel and Schrier's study of Spanish FL teachers). Widening further, three chapters look at new technology: a polemic (Fast), research on a small group of French FL learners using message boards (Chism), and a review of theory-based curricular efforts to connect FL learners with one another and with texts through computer technology at San Diego State University (Lyman-Hager, Johns, Nocon, & Davis).

For a published volume, one wonders why the chapters are grouped thematically, with categories like “Technology for Reading Instruction,” “Effects of Writing Systems,” “Advanced Learners' Processing,” or “Findings about Teachers.” Perhaps the answer lies in the fact that topics of individual studies overlap—in particular, So's dual research into one student's writing in FL Japanese and Japanese composition evaluators' focus on form or content.

Despite the apparently arbitrary sequencing and complete lack of cross referencing between chapters, clear abstracts opened each chapter, helping this reader to locate related topics. But no index! Isn't that tool particularly needed with such disparate research? And wouldn't an index justify the trouble of publishing a collection in book form rather than on the Web?