The acquisition and use of Spanish and English as first and second languages: Selected papers from the 12th Annual Convention of Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages, Mexico City, April 4-9, 1978 Ed. by Roger W. Andersen (review)

236 LANGUAGE, VOLUME 57, NUMBER 1 (1981) a syntactic rule that changes a pronoun into its corresponding reflexive, and a semantic rule that assigns coreferentiality between the reflexive and its antecedent. Carl Kerschner, using generative semantic theory as a model, discusses copula realization in Spanish. Mariza Pimenta-Bueno uses an analysis of the Portuguese clitic se to provide evidence for lexical redundancy rules as distinct from transformational rules. John Robert Schmitz studies the occurrence of certain classes of adjectives with ser, estar, and estar -ndo. Finally, Jacob Orstein and Guadalupe ValdesFallis offer a state-of-the-art paper which attempts to report on the various activities of researchers dealing with Spanish of the Southwest . [T. D. Terrell, University ofCalifornia, Irvine.] The acquisition and use of Spanish and English as first and second languages : Selected papers from the 12th Annual Convention of Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages, Mexico City, April 4-9, 1978. Ed. by Roger W. Andersen. Washington, DC: Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages , 1979. Pp. 181. $6.50. All twelve articles in this collection—one of the more interesting volumes to have appeared in recent years—are good; and some are very good. In spite of the title, all deal with aspects of second (not first) language acquisition. John Shumann reviews studies done on the acquisition of negation in English, focusing particularly on the so-called preverbal negation stage. Rose Nash discusses the incorrect use of false cognates by Puerto Ricans when speaking English: 'Some type (Sp. tipo) was acting silly in a bar.' Roger Andersen investigates the relationship between first-language transfer and second-language overgeneralization. William Flink shows how a factor analysis can be used profitably to determine various learner strategies in second-language acquisition . (The techniques are very interesting, but it is unfortunate that some researchers are still using translation of sentences as a measure of achievement.) Betty Mace-Matluck's paper on the order of acquisition of English morphemes is similar to previous studies, but differs crucially in that the language backgrounds of the subjects were (in addition to Spanish) Cantonese , Tagalog, and Ilokano. Her results agree essentially with earlier studies, but she suggests that some of the variation may well be caused by first-language background. Anna Chamot looks at the acquisition of English by a child bilingual in Spanish and French, focusing principally on the strategies of simplification and language transfer. David Turner, in his study of adult Spanish speakers acquiring English, tests Stephen Krashen's Monitor Model and concludes that his data are consistent with it: subjects show little practical effect of formal language instruction, but considerable improvement on grammar tests which presumably tap learned rules and encourage monitoring. Sandra Plann reports on the acquisition of Spanish gender, number, and verb-subject agreement by students in the Culver City Spanish Immersion Program. Although the program achieved its goal of effective communication in Spanish with native speakers, neither number and gender agreement in the noun phrase nor subject-verb agreement was completely acquired by the students; furthermore, no trend of improvement was found across the six years of the program. She concludes: 'perhaps in light of the limited interaction with native speakers of the target language, the goal of native-like proficiency in an immersion program is an unrealistic one.' A more realistic goal is ability to communicate ideas and feelings clearly tonative speakers ofthe secondlanguage. José Galván and Russell Campbell examine the communication strategies employed by children in this same language program. Susan Gonzo and Mario Saltarelli look at immigrant languages, Spanish in this case, and propose a Monitoring Principle (different from Krashen's Monitor Model) to explain drift away from standard-language norms, as evidenced in the speech of generations following the original immigrants. Eugene Garcia and Robin Aquilera look at language-switching during mother-child interactions; they conclude that language switching is comparatively rare, and that when it does occur, 'it may serve a very meaningful function related to conversational clarification and possible language teaching.' [T. D. Terrell , University of California, Irvine.] ...