Status and function of languages and language varieties Edited by Ulrich Ammon (review)

BOOK NOTICES Beginning to read: Thinking and learning about print. By Marilyn Jager Adams. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1990. Pp. x, 494. Cloth $29.95. The Reading Research and Education Center at the Center for the Study of Reading at the University of Illinois. Urbana, sponsored this book, which is an important sequel to Jeanne Chall's Learning to read: The great debate. Adams forcefully makes the point that fluent reading includes, as a necessary condition, a mastery of the code that relates marks on the page to units of the child's internalized language . By Congressional mandate, the book is charged 'to provide guidance as to how schools might maximize the quality of phonic instruction in beginning reading programs'. In keeping with this charge, its principal topic is the development ofbasic reading and reading readiness abilities in young children. Adams brings together a prodigious amount of class-based and experimental research to make the point that a reading program must contain a systematic approach to phonics in order to assure success for most of its students. The book presents such a clear and convincing case that it is sure to be read in education masters programs, to the extent that the prejudice against phonics held by many proponents of 'whole language' can be checked. This camp argues that, since comprehension is the ultimate goal of reading, a reading program should focus on this goal to the exclusion of phonics. While not disputing the obvious, Adams urges the common-sense and empirically valid view that fluent reading rests upon a vast array ofdetailed linguistic skills and abilities. These are not innate , and she demonstrates the importance of explicit attention to developing these capacities in the teaching of reading. The 'phonics vs. whole language' debate has become highly politicized, as described in Part I, where the development of writing is also sketched. Part II focuses on why phonics is so important for a satisfactory reading program. Phonemic awareness at the beginning of the first grade stands out as a causal contributor to shortterm and long-term reading advances: at the same time, this awareness also follows from early experiences with reading. 388 Proficient reading involves the complicated orchestration of orthographic, phonological, and semantic processes, at the word level and lower. These components must interact rapidly, accurately, and tacitly in order to support higher-order syntactic and semantic comprehension . In Part III, Adams not only establishes the skills and knowledge that constitute these components, but she also shows how they in turn depend on sophisticated syntactic abilities. The research in Parts II and III is brought together to construct a model, comprised of interacting linguistic and orthographic processors, describing how fluent readers mediate between print and speech. This model serves as a basis for analyzing vulnerabilities and remedies. In Part IV Adams discusses the acquisition of the skills and knowledge modelled in Part III. She starts from the basic question, 'What does it mean to have learned something?', and proceeds through a detailed account of early stages in the development of the model. Part V then focuses on the acquisition of reading itself, with specific pedagogic recommendations. In Part VI Adams summarizes her conclusions about the fundamental importance of the child's mastery of the alphabetic principle and of the linguisticorthographic relations. A particularly appealing aspect of the book is its tone of advocacy on behalf of children and our responsibility to be rational and effective in teaching them essential literacy skills. [Charles Cairns, Queens College of the City University of New York.} Status and function of languages and language varieties, Ed. by Ulrich Ammon. Berlin & New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1989. Pp. x, 665. DM 276.00. The initial impetus for this volume came from the papers given at the sociolinguistics section of the eleventh World Congress of the International Sociological Association, which met in New Delhi in August, 1986. Ammon recruited 20 additional papers beyond those actually presented at the congress, so that the present volume contains 27 papers. As in many collections of papers, the resulting volume is wide-ranging BOOK NOTICES 389 but does not provide systematic coverage of the topic in question. Rather, there is considerable overlap...