Observation in the language classroom By Dick Allwright (review)

BOOK NOTICES Hungarian inflectional morphology. By Daniel Mario Abondolo. (Bibliotheca Urálica, 9.) Budapest: Akad émiai Kiadó, 1988. Pp. 292. $28.00. This is the book for anyone determined to fathom the maze of Hungarian morphophonemics . Abondolo aims at 'economy, thoroughness and consistency', and certainly offers the most complete account to date. The book is a revision of a Columbia University dissertation, and the framework owes much to Robert Austerlitz , to whom the book is dedicated. In its postulation of abstract underlying forms and derivational rules which recapitulate diachronic changes, the approach is germane to generative phonology, though references are few. Thus the nominative madár 'bird' is derived from the underlying form /madara/, the stem-final vowel being dropped and the penultimate vowel lengthened in compensation. No phonological features are used, however; the primitives are phonemic. An introduction (17-28) presents the 'morphophonemic code' in which underlying forms are represented. Ch. 1 (29-83) motivates the root structures and morphophonemic processes assumed for Hungarian: vowel harmony and lengthening, consonant assimilation and gemination . Ch. 2 (84-178) is devoted to verbal morphology and Ch. 3 (179-264) to nominal morphology . The conclusion (265-71) surveys the results achieved and outlines possible extensions to deictic and derivational morphology. A uses some rather original tools. Some functionally -motivated asymmetries in the verbal morphology are treated by representing person features as concentric circles, yielding a particularly elegant account of object agreement and of the occurrence or avoidance of syncretism. Another innovation is the integration of stylistic features such as 'slang' and 'foreign' into the system; the operation of vowel harmony is of interest here. On the surface, the daunting complexity remains : dedicated readers may find their way through the maze but have trouble remembering the route. Phonological theorists may find the framework unnecessarily idiosyncratic. But at the descriptive level this study does offer truly comprehensive coverage of a whole level of grammar, providing a rich storehouse of data against which theoretical claims can be tested. [Stephen Matthews, University of Southern California.] Observation in the language classroom. By Dick Allwright. (Applied linguistics and language study.) London and New York: Longman, 1988. Pp. xvi, 288. When the final report of the Pennsylvania Project was published in 1970, it had already been the subject ofa special issue ofthe Modern Language Journal (vol. 53, no. 6, October 1969). Critics, perhaps disappointed in the finding of no significant differences in student achievement under traditional and audiolingual methods, were particularly unhappy with the Project's techniques of classroom observation. As Allwright points out, 'The time was ripe, then, for an alternative approach to classroom language learning research' (10). The alternative, according to Allwright. came from the general classroom observation system developed by Ned A. Flanders in the early 1960s, a system Flanders called 'interaction analysis'. Although there are no excerpts here from Flanders, his system is repeatedly discussed in passages from other authors, and there is enough information about the Flanders system and its various adaptations to enable teachers and researchers to apply the systems to actual classroom situations, should they choose to do so. Allwright traces changes in the approaches, techniques, and goals of systematic observation in the foreign/second language classroom from the reception of the Pennsylvania Project, through various modifications of the Flanders system, to a 1980 article of his own. The book resembles a carefully-planned 'course packet" with extended excerpts from fifteen articles, each introduced and concluded by a few paragraphs of Allwright's insightful commentary. The 'Follow-up activities and points for discussion ' at the end of each chapter make it clear that this is a textbook for preservice or inservice teacher training. Nevertheless, the overview of the subject Allwright provides may be interesting to those not already familiar with the his183 184 LANGUAGE, VOLUME 66. NUMBER 1 (1990) torical development of classroom observation from 1968 to 1980; it certainly is important as a review of major issues and problems in classroom -based research. Ch. I (1-43) presents classroom observation in assessments of the effectiveness of various foreign language methods and teaching techniques . Classroom observation as an instrument for feedback in teacher training is covered in Ch. 2 (44-108), while criticisms...