Although this work constitutes Volume 9 of the series Foreign language teaching in Europe, the reader should take literally neither the latter geographical indication nor the title's claim to novelty. Whereas the first half of the dozen authors are American and the second half European, the topics largely cut across the oceanic divide. As for the topics, they correspond to major themes in the field of second and foreign language education over the span of the last two decades.

The most striking feature of the volume is its clear organization, obviously the result of careful planning. The work consists of four parts, each comprised of three chapters devoted to the same topic. The four topics are sociocultural theory, communicative language teaching, intercultural communicative competence, and learner autonomy. Curiously, there is no explanation offered for this particular set of topics. What makes the scheme of the volume particularly helpful is the fact that each of the three chapters within a topic has a distinct function: The first is theoretical, outlining the development of the theory and its key concepts; the second reviews relevant theoretical or empirical research, or both, with special attention to implications for language education; and the third discusses some application(s) of the given theory. Happily, this plan is carefully adhered to by the chapter authors. Moreover, each chapter concludes with a fairly copious bibliography.

All of the foregoing features increase the likelihood that the volume will be well suited to one of its stated objectives: inciting the development of new theoretical concepts and the execution of new research projects. The volume should be particularly useful to researchers interested in these topics, and it would lend itself particularly well to graduate seminars on research in second language learning and teaching. Unfortunately and inexplicably, the successful editing on the structural level did not extend to details of the texts. In the first two pages of the first chapter, I counted a total of eight editing errors. Although the frequency of such errors does diminish as one proceeds through the volume, chapters are often marred by curious omissions of commas or lexical infelicities that appear to be related to normative use of the language (e.g., the expression depart from is used repeatedly in the last chapter of Part 3 with the sense of to start from).

In Part 1, “Sociocultural Theory,” Lantolf's laudably comprehensible and jargon-free theoretical introduction is followed by Grabois' effective review of related research (e.g., usefulness of recasts, effects of different types of teacher-learner groupings). Thorne discusses an action research project in which advanced learners of Spanish reviewed essays written by less advanced peers.

Savignon's introduction to Part 2, “Communicative Language Teaching” (CLT), is a wide-ranging essay that captures some of the current issues in the field and then reviews several published studies of various reform efforts. Musumeci's short chapter reviews some well-known research directions in CLT: immersion education, interaction, tasks, the role of explicit instruction, and focus on form. Kinginger's chapter is a well-done exposition of a classroom project in telecollaboration that includes both practical and theoretical considerations.

Part 3, “Intercultural Communicative Competence,” is dominated by two substantial chapters authored by Sercu. The first is a comprehensive outline of notions of culture and approaches to its teaching within foreign language education. Sercu's favored model is that of the six savoirs, a model developed by Byram and Zarate for the Council of Europe in 1994 (p. 118). Sercu's research review is equally comprehensive and constructively critical. De Wachter and Decavele's chapter, which purports to provide “some guidelines for better results on the ‘intercultural competence’ level” (p. 157), spends most of its effort introducing another framework: Gardner's multiple intelligences.

Part 4's three chapters on learner autonomy are authored by teams of researchers from the University of Nijmegen, each including van Esch. The inclusion of this topic is a bit puzzling, given that the preceding volume in this series was likewise edited by van Esch and St. John and devoted entirely to the topic of learner autonomy. The exposition of this theory remains, in my opinion, a bit too abstract and circular, without a clear and compelling statement of the justification for such an approach. The research chapter, after enumerating a number of studies with mostly negative results, goes on to conclude that we do not know much about the effectiveness of learner autonomy in the classroom (p. 213). The final chapter continues in a fairly abstract vein as it outlines several teacher education modules relating to learner autonomy created and implemented by the authors.