Savignon's goal for this volume is to describe various “initiatives, projects, and activities” that seek to make language teaching communicative in the broad sense (p. ix). Interestingly, half of the pages that follow the introductory chapter are devoted to projects in Asia (Japan, Hong Kong, and Taiwan), and the three articles from the American context have either a primarily theoretical focus or a report on innovation through technology. The remaining contribution reports on a project in the Netherlands to increase autonomy on the part of second language learners. The overarching motif of the volume is that of innovation and its dependence on specific contextual conditions, with a recurring theme being the difficulty of effecting significant change in teacher behaviors.

In her introduction, Savignon offers a schematic historical overview and miscellaneous reflections on the concept of communicative language teaching (CLT). She takes as the formative text Canale and Swain's (1980) development of the Hymes (1971) notion of communicative competence and adds her own imprint by citing “the familiar ‘inverted pyramid’ classroom model proposed in Savignon (1983).” It is not clear from this discussion just what new contribution is made by this model, which Savignon elaborates in terms of components of a communicative curriculum model: language arts, personal language use, language for a purpose, theater arts, and language use beyond the classroom (Savignon, 1983, 1997).

The first three chapters constitute a case study of English language teaching in Japan from the various perspectives of a member of the National Ministry of Education (Wada), a teacher educator (Sato), and a teacher (Hubbell). The second of these is the most extensive, reporting the findings of a large study of how the English teachers of a large private high school learn to teach in this school environment. The multiple sources of data yield a very interesting description, which complements well the chapter's opening theoretical overview of research on the relation between teacher beliefs and practices. Despite the major initiatives implemented by the Japanese government to move toward communication-oriented English language teaching, the overall picture that emerges is rather pessimistic, which suggests that significant innovation is impeded by contextual factors such as the nature of college entrance examinations, the limited linguistic proficiency of many teachers, conflicting school norms and values, and teachers' preference for familiar patterns of teaching. Sato concludes that the critical missing element in such a top-down attempt at innovation is meaningful teacher development within the school context: “For innovation to happen, we must find ways to help teachers to become lifelong learners in a collaborative environment” (p. 81).

In the study reported by Cheng in the following chapter, very similar conclusions emerge about the washback effect on classroom teaching of changes in the English examinations administered by the Hong Kong Examinations Authority. Although American readers may take comfort in how much further many of us have come than our Asian colleagues in implementing CLT, the contextual factors described here and their innovation-limiting effects will certainly be all too familiar to the American audience. A final chapter on the Asian context (this time looking at English teaching in Taiwan) echoes similar themes but with a greater emphasis on sociocultural factors, such as the emphasis placed by school administrators and by parents on test results and the form-based nature of Chinese language learning in this culture.

As previously suggested, the American-authored contributions are quite different in nature from the preceding ones, as well as from each other. After a brief exposition of the content of the National Standards for Foreign Language Learning, Schwartz discusses issues surrounding their implementation in what is primarily a theoretical discussion based on Markee's (1997) diffusion of innovations model. Musumeci's chapter reports on the Spanish Project at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign—an apparently successful attempt to use technology to “foster language learning both inside and outside the conventional classroom setting through a redistribution of instructional resources in a way that supports communicative language teaching” (p. 164). Finally, in what is perhaps the most thought-provoking piece of the volume, Kinginger recommends an approach to teacher education that avoids both the promotion of a single method and the uncritical, eclectic approach by involving teachers in their own reading and interpretation of expert discourses, which would allow teachers to see the same pedagogical problem from diverse perspectives.