Vocabulary has long been one of ESL's wallflowers, ignored in favor of more exotic and attractive subjects. Fortunately, vocabulary in L2 learning is starting to turn some heads again, as Second Language Vocabulary Acquisition will attest. It is a collection of articles offering concise, informative surveys of research on various aspects of L2 vocabulary acquisition, including the link between reading and vocabulary acquisition.

The book has five sections. The first, "Setting the Stage," begins with a historical review of trends in L2 language instruction, followed by "The Lexical Plight in Second Language Reading," which challenges commonly-held assumptions about the usefulness of guessing word meaning from context. The section ends with an article discussing how orthographic knowledge affects L2 processing, which points out that different orthographies (like logographic systems, such as Japanese kanji) can contribute to different kinds of processing and reading strategies.

The second section carries three case studies of vocabulary acquisition. The first describes a study of the radically different approaches of a Greek and a Korean student to guessing word meaning from context. The next two describe one researcher's long-term study of his own experience learning Hebrew words, and another's Portugese reading and vocabulary development during a five-month stay in Brazil.

Part III of the book is devoted to empirical research, including a study of vocabulary acquisition using an experimental language, and a study of an important but rarely looked at topic: vocabulary acquisition by advanced learners and how their passive knowledge of rare words and complex lexical units increases. The last article in this section is a study comparing vocabulary learning by incidental exposure through reading versus reading plus vocabulary instruction. The findings indicate that, contrary to some claims, direct teaching of vocabulary can lead to better learning gains.

The next section of the book, "Pedagogy," includes articles on mnemonic methods in vocabulary teaching, vocabulary acquisition through extensive reading, methods for effective vocabulary instruction, and a discussion of the pedagogical implications of the lexical approach. The fifth and final section of the book contains a summary article by James Coady on the state of vocabulary acquisition research today.

This book is certainly not meant as an introductory text to the subject. Still, most of the articles, especially those in the "Pedagogy" section , are accessible to anyone with a background in ESL reading. Another plus is that authors who wrote for Interactive Approaches to Second Language Reading (1988) (another book in the Cambridge Applied Linguistics series) have articles in this book, so a reader familiar with both books can gain sense of how trends in reading studies and vocabulary acquisition are moving. Second Language Vocabulary Acquisition is well worth reading, and certainly gives this neglected subject the attention it has long deserved.

Reviewed by David Dycus
Aichi Shukutoku University