Les politiques linguistiques by Jean-Louis Calvet (review)

BOOK NOTICES 665 for this purpose, remain controversial. [Stella Markantonatou , Institute for Speech and Language Processing, Athens, Greece.] Guide to readability in African languages . Ed. by Chia Emmanuel Nges. München & Newcastle: Lincom Europa , 1996. Pp. 130. The volume contains seven papers written for a projecton readability in African languages sponsored by UNESCO. The opening contribution, 'Orthography and readability' (by Ursula Wiesemann), deals with orthography, tones and accents, punctuation, and the selection of a reference dialect. The author argues that spelling must above all reflect pronunciation while alphabets should be based on the native speaker's intuition. When dealing with tones, one should neither mark all of them nor omit them altogether . Other issues discussed relate to accent writing , hyphenation, stylistic contractions, sentence and paragraph separation, and quote identification. 'Reading and writing tone in African languages' (by Joseph Mfonyam) reflects the author's research on Bafut and Limbum. In general, writes the author, surface lexical and grammatical tones must be marked systematically in any language where the functional load of tone is significant. The tone writing system should be kept as simple as possible. In tone pedagogy, teachers should start with the lexical tone and introduce grammatical tones later in grammatical drills. 'Visibility in reading' (by Chia Emmanuel Nges) concentrates on the topographical aspect of readability . In essence, materials for beginners should ideally be written in roman characters with serifs, measuring 14 to 18 points, of a black, blue, or green color, and there should be no more than eight words per line. 'Vocabulary grading' (by Gabriel Mba & Chia Emmanuel Chia) dwells on experiments involving Lamnso and Ewondo. According to the authors, the beginning ofthe primer must include short, concrete, picturable, familiar, and frequent words that are first used in their primary meaning. If there are literary activities in the language, it may be useful to establish word frequency lists to determine text difficulty. 'Grading sentence patterns and structures in Yoruba and related languages' (by Oladele Awobuluyi ) is based on a study covering Yoruba, Igbo, and Edo. The author argues that since grading takes into consideration the previous relevant knowledge of students, it is more crucial for L2 than for L1 learners, and for children than for adults. Ll beginners should start with sentences with a basic word order and a transparent meaning, whereas for L2 learners, for functional or pedagogical reasons, complex sentences and patterns may have to be taught first. In 'Grading Swahili sentence patterns and structures ', John Ogwana points out that Swahili has fifteen simple sentence patterns of varying constituents, which he regroups into four types for grading purposes : the two-constituent, the three-constituent, and the four-constituent verbal patterns, and the impersonal verb pattern. Constructions involving verbs with fewer, more useful, and frequent affixes should be introduced first. In grading the nominal pattern, nouns with clear and systematic concord affixes should be taught before transposed classes while pronominal referents should be introduced in the following order: subject referents, subject and pronominal referents, subject and relative pronominal referents, and finally a combination of all these three types. Complex sentences must be graded starting with the /¡«-infinitive structure, followed by the ?a-consecutive structure, the e-operative structure, and the relative affix structure. Finally, in the 'Measurement of text difficulty', Nges writes that the ease with which a text can be read may be measured objectively through readability formulas. Since none of the latter is specifically adapted to African languages, he recommends a tentative use of the Fry Readability Graph and of the Gunning Fog Index, while stressing that these formulas do not take syntactic, stylistic, and semantic complexity into account. In the volume, the discussion of the same topic under different chapters inevitably leads to some repetition , as shown in the treatment of tone grading by Wiesemann and Mfonyam. The specific problems faced by Ll and L2 learners respectively do not appear to have been addressed by all the contributors. A couple ofcontributions feature analyses and details that may be too complex to be of any real benefit to the intended readers who are mostly nonlinguists. This problem is, however, solved thanks to the timely summary provided by the editor. At times the contributions read like a...