This is a textbook designed for use by those studying, researching, and teaching in the field of gender and language. Although it is written from the perspective of linguistics, it is also accessible to people in other relevant disciplines, such as sociology, psychology, and education. As a teacher (Celia Kitzinger) and as an advanced undergraduate student (Rose Rickford) in a sociology department, we read this book at our different academic career stages and both found it a comprehensive and scholarly overview of the field and a useful resource for our own work.

The book introduces key terms and concepts in the field and covers a wide range and variety of topics, including everything from corpus linguistics to poststructuralism, ELT textbooks to fairytales. It uses a largely chronological format to track gender and language study from early work on sex/gender speech differences through to more contemporary work on discourse and social action. As a teacher, I (Celia) was pleased to find together in one volume a collection of work that I regularly recommend as core reading, but which normally involves students in several trips to the library. These include, as well as an extract from one of my own articles (sadly, with errors introduced into the data extract), key texts by Robin Lakoff, Dale Spender, Joshua Fishman, Daniel N. Malz & Ruth A. Borker, Deborah Cameron, Mary Bucholtz, Sara Mills, and Penelope Eckert & Sally McConnell-Ginet. The inclusion of primary materials, introduced and discussed by Sunderland in their scholarly contexts, is a particularly helpful feature of the book. The “textbook” format also includes “Reflection tasks” and “Follow-up tasks” posing questions for the reader to consider, useful suggestions for ways to engage critically with the literature, and ideas for ways of incorporating the theories and methodologies of different writers into the reader's own work. As a student, I (Rose) found this book a very simple and accessible entry point into a wide range of literature. I was particularly impressed by the combination of outlines, extracts and tasks that make this book an interesting and enjoyable resource offering many original and innovative assignment ideas.

A substantial section of the book is devoted to a series of research “tasks” that can be assigned to students as seminar exercises (although, as Sunderland points out, some could also be the basis for much more substantial research endeavors) or used by students on their own initiative in expanding their understanding. The tasks are carefully explained, well referenced, and sensibly connected with the scholarly literature. They include writing a book review; recording conversations and analyzing the use of tag questions, topic initiation, or overlapping talk; web research on self-help books; television research on advertisements; creating an annotated bibliography; researching Polari; and investigating the construction of “sex differences” in popular magazines. Acknowledging and building on students' use of the Internet, the book encourages use of the World Wide Web as a publication outlet for research outcomes (e.g., on a “Gender and language” website created by members of a course) and also highlights use of the Web as a resource for researching language use, and for accessing bibliographies and data corpora. A website associated with the book (www.routledge.com/textbooks/0415311047) offers a set of essay questions and additional supporting information (e.g., links to relevant websites) – though this is currently fairly minimal and there is scope for developing it. Finally, we were also pleased to see that the book is written so as to address readers whose first language is not English, and that it encourages research on gender in other languages (e.g., through the “tasks”).

Despite the overall clarity with which the book is written – and the clear, uncluttered layout with clean typeface, “flags” in the margins, and lots of white space, which makes the book visually appealing and accessible – its overall structure is somewhat complex and potentially confusing. As is the case with all books in the Routledge Applied Linguistics series, it is divided into sections on two different criteria. Primarily, it is divided into three sections: A, Introduction; B, Extension; C, Exploration. Section A includes an overview by Sunderland of a range of topics. Section B is where extracts from the literature are reproduced. Section C is composed of suggestions for tasks and projects. Each of these sections is subdivided into 10 numbered units, relating to topic, each of which is included in all three sections. So, for example, Unit 7 is about discourse and discourses. A student looking to read about discourse and discourses would be interested, therefore, in Unit A7 (starting on p. 47), Unit B7 (starting on p. 165) and Unit C7 (starting on p. 283), all of which closely relate to one another. The book would be simpler and easier to use to its full potential if these three units were placed together. Readers who do not take the time to work out the complex structure would be likely to miss out on sections relevant to their field of study. We suggest reading, and encouraging students to read, the section called “How to use this book” (ix–xxiv) before hunting for particular topics of interest.

As with any book of this scope, there are some omissions. From our (joint) perspective as conversation analysts interested in sexual-identity issues in language, we want to identify two areas in particular that we would like to have seen better represented in this book. First, we were disappointed that there wasn't a more thorough (and up-to-date) treatment of conversation analysis as a distinctive perspective in the study of gender and language. Since the early debates between Schegloff and Wetherell about whether or not a feminist CA is possible (debates that are cited), “feminist conversation analysis” (Kitzinger 2000) has become established over the last five years as a method for understanding how gender (and other social identities) are produced in interaction (see Wilkinson & Kitzinger 2007 for an overview) and for researching a range of issues of concern to feminists, from home birth help-lines to beauty salon interactions (see Kitzinger 2007). Second, although Sunderland acknowledges readers' likely interest in “developing further their understanding of the multiplicity of meanings of ‘gender’ itself” (xiii), we were disappointed by the lack of attention to genders other than “male” and “female” in this book. Sunderland's commentary is very much focused on the construction of “women” and “men,” “girls” and “boys” in discourse and interaction. These categories are not thoroughly problematized, and there is very little inclusion of work on gender categories and identities beyond these boundaries, such as drag queens, hijras, intersex and trans people, butch and femme (see, e.g., Barrett 1995, Livia 1995, Hall 1997). Although Sunderland treats language as constitutive and shows that, and how, gender is constructed, there is much less emphasis on deconstructing gender. As a result, students relying on this textbook as their introduction to the field would be likely to grasp the argument that gender roles and behaviors are constructed, but not the (more radical) argument that the very ideas of gender and dichotomous sex categories are themselves social constructions.

These caveats aside, the book is a valuable addition to field of gender and language and offers an excellent resource for teachers, students and researchers working in the field.