A collection of 15 chapters that deal with morphosyntactic development in second language (L2) learners, this work is divided into two parts: In the first, various perspectives on L2 development are provided; in the second, the focus is on classroom research relating to the teaching of grammar.
Part 1 contains chapters on some familiar L2 morphosyntactic issues, including focus constructions (Odlin), tough-movement constructions (Callies), the causative-inchoative alternation (Szcześniak), and wh-noun clauses (Can, Kilimci, and Altunkol). Additionally, Sharwood Smith and Truscott provide a succinct and clear summary of modular growth and use of language (MOGUL), a framework based on Jackendoff’s (e.g., Reference Jackendoff2002) architecture of the language faculty that seeks to account for language acquisition and crosslinguistic influence. Gabryś-Barker comments further on MOGUL in her contribution, “Syntactic Processing in Multilingual Performance.”
In Part 2, several chapters discuss focus-on-form instruction in a communicative context. Pawlak examines the acquisition of third person –s and concludes that corrective feedback is highly effective for improving learners’ accuracy in production. Similarly, Król-Markefka finds that the combination of explicit rule presentation and communicative practice leads to gains in the use of articles, whereas Mystkowska-Wiertelak discusses Larsen-Freeman’s (Reference Larsen-Freeman and Celce-Murcia1991) notion of grammaring and emphasizes the importance of communication in language teaching. Paradowski outlines the cognitive language interface method, a method of teaching based on Gozdawa-Gołębiowski’s (Reference Gozdawa-Gołębiowski2003) work that was strongly influenced by contrastive analysis. The last chapter is more theoretically oriented: Sadownik outlines stages of development in Polish learners’ acquisition of German negation in relation to Wode’s (Reference Wode1983) theories.
A strong point of much of this research is that it addresses first languages (L1s) that are relatively understudied, including Polish, Turkish, and Russian. However, there are a few inconsistencies, particularly in the first part. First, although entitled “Studies on ESL/EFL Morphosyntactic Development,” several of the studies in this section relate to the acquisition of languages other than English. Kassotaki’s article, “The Morphology –me in Modern Greek as L2: How German and Russian L2 Learners Interpret Verbal Constructions” deals with Greek, whereas Ewert’s contribution “L1 Syntactic Preferences of Polish Adolescents in Bilingual and Monolingual Education Programmes” investigates Polish students’ evaluation of various constructions in their L1 after L2 instruction. A second inconsistency is that a few of the studies only loosely deal with morphosyntax. For instance, Zimmermann’s chapter, “Pragmatic (In)competence in EFL Writing,” examines a classroom task in which students compose polite letters making a request to a hypothetical professor; Zimmermann determines that many of the students lack sensitivity to Gricean maxims and fail to follow the typical structure of such request letters. Another example is Łyda’s chapter, “Last to Acquire: On the Relation of Concession in Interpreting,” which examines whether students in translation or interpretation programs are successful at translating English concessive markers such as although, yet, and nevertheless.
In general, the chapters in this book provide a good deal of general background and literature review but spend relatively less time discussing new empirical research. Additionally, only a small portion of the current issues of interest to researchers of L2 morphosyntax is addressed. For these reasons, this book may be disappointing for those who are well versed in current morphosyntactic issues in SLA and are looking for larger scale, cutting-edge empirical research. On the other hand, this book could be quite useful for beginning researchers attempting to reach a broad understanding of some of the questions and challenges that face L2 researchers, particularly those who are interested in speakers of understudied L1s.
