- Email: [email protected]
Educating second language teachers
Book reviews / System 61 (2016) 110e120
111
wears his (hungry) heart on his sleeve. Yet what do his fans actually listen to, the lyrics or the music? Ruth Finnegan stresses the importance of the ‘vocalized’ words of a song and the performance alike, but adds that “this is not to denigrate the significance e the wonder e of the verbal textualities” (p. 101). Au contraire. I believe it interesting enough that, in his SXSW keynote address at Austin, Texas, in 2012, Springsteen himself, referring to Dylan, should say that “he gave us the words [emphasis mine] to understand our hearts”. Because of their evocative nature, words carry willy-nilly many deeper elements with them which, as Jacques Derrida put it, differ and defer. It's the difference and distance between, on the one hand, reality, and on the other, mystery. It is also an issue that, somehow, this book deals with. Although she admits to having rejected Chomsky's “irrational, or at best unfounded, speculative abstractions” (p. 111) for most of her life, Ruth Finnegan possesses that perfect blend of courage, intellectual honesty, and style, that makes her say that, almost to her surprise, there's “some value in the idea of language as having some kind of existence prior to its formulation in performance” (p. 107). Following a short stay in hospital, and wondering “about just how language and imagination are linked” (p. 115), for example, she discovered “creative, created, literature” (p. 117) in her own dreams. “This must seem e as it does, indeed, to myself e the product of religious or mystical ideologies, paranormal, hallucinatory; certainly not the scientific hard evidence expected of linguistic analysis” (p. 117), and yet to explore and recount what is seen and heard in REM sleep is a challenge any anthropologist may find difficult to resist. After all, Chagall and Goya, just to name a couple of artists, did the same in their paintings and etchings, and so did many others in the fields of literature, music, cinema, even politics. Even the Bible. It would be impossible to give a detailed description of what recounting dreams is about. Dreams are shaped by cultural traditions. Ruth Finnegan was born in Derry, Northern Ireland, in 1933, at the a time when the world was either Catholic or Protestant, though she was lucky enough as to receive a non-sectarian upbringing. Given the tradition in which she grew up “and the biblical and Bunyan-rich Quaker school I attended, the language, cadences and images of the narratives cannot avoid being biblical” (p. 122). Therefore, her dreams are densely populated with angels and saints, and God struggling to create the world, while the music in the background is Bach's B Minor Mass, or “Amazing Grace”, or some Christmas carol. Where is Language? is a compelling book especially because of its author. Her prose and imagination are overflowing and magnificent, her stories enchanting. Adjectives always abound. Ruth Finnegan is in her early eighties and still young at heart. To paraphrase Eliot, a poet she often quotes, she's always struggling, always reaffirming, always resuming her march. Her journey into language has brought her on the threshold of what she calls “earthly heavenly arts”. Like Plato's Phaedo (XXXV) voiced a longing for some sort of stronger vessel, some divine revelation, to cross safely and securely the sea of meaning, she wonders alike: “Can it be that there is some original form of language […] wrought by men's hands, a product of the earth and of art e but surely e metaphorically if you prefer e of divine origin?” (p. 125). Well, I don't know. But “in the beginning was the Word” (John 1, 1). Emanuela Bossi Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Largo A. Gemelli 1, 20123 Milano, Italy Universita E-mail address: [email protected]
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.system.2016.06.012
Educating second language teachers, Donald Freeman. Oxford University Press, Oxford (2016). xxi þ 290 pp.
This most recent, almost 300 page work by Donald Freeman of the University of Michigan comes in the Oxford Applied Linguistics Series and is the result of many decades of practising and writing about the profession. Interestingly, for one who has contributed so much to language teacher education, the author explains in the preface that at the start of his language teaching career forty years ago he was untrained. That is one reason why his exploration of how people teach includes those who are actually untrained. They may, for instance, have fallen into the job through being native speakers in a context where trained language teachers are in short supply or where those with training have difficulty actually speaking the language. The book's intriguing sub-title (although this doesn't appear on the cover) is The same things done differently, which provides one possible filter for reading the contents. What is familiar? What is different? The contents come in a mixture of literature references, original first person accounts and the author's interpretations of these. The unattributed first person accounts are presumably the author's own reflections. Explaining the contents of this solid piece of work organisationally is straightforward thanks to the detailed and original labelling and sub-labelling of the book's four parts, thirteen chapters and multiple chapter parts. All these sections have clever, sometimes lengthy and often subtly worded titles, as in Part 1's first chapter, ‘Teaching (language) teaching’. The use of brackets reflects a point made in the Preface, and later throughout the book, that some aspects of teaching are more important than the lesson content, in our case language. As an example, he believes that “socialisation is a part of any teacher's learning” (p. xi).
112
Book reviews / System 61 (2016) 110e120
Less easy is explaining the contents' underlying connections. Be ready for original descriptors such as “the isomorphic relationship” (Ch. 1), “an ethnocognitive model” (Ch. 8) and “knowledge geographies” (Ch. 10) and literary allusions: “a tale of two conferences” in Ch. 4. Mentioning these is not supposed to put readers off. Quite the opposite. When we read for professional development it would be disappointing to find that we understood every point at first glance. Also there are chapters whose sub-headings are perfectly clear on the surface and yet on further digging become intriguingly thoughtprovoking. Because of the length and depth of the contents, the rest of this review will select some highlights from throughout the book to whet the appetite rather attempting to summarise the 100 subsections of all the chapters and appendices. In Part 1, ‘How people use what they know to do what they do in the language classroom’, Chapter 2 addresses ‘The central challenges in second language teacher education’. The three challenges Freeman suggests are defining language as content, identifying what is unique about language teaching, and thirdly discovering how language users and former language students learn to teach. His examples come from a range of languages and dialects including some unique features of Australian English. The idea of “language teaching identity” (pp. 34e36) may not be familiar to the new teacher and yet in time that person becomes socialised through a combination of classroom experience and use of the language. Are language teachers recognisable in public as a sub-species? To my shock, I was once asked at a social function by a total stranger (not a teacher), “Excuse me, but are you a teacher or do you live in …. ?”, naming one of the more affluent city suburbs. In Part 2, ‘Learning to be a language teacher’, I was particularly interested in Chapter 3 on ‘How people become language teachers: defining background knowledge’. Freeman considers three positions which be describes as a “rough continuum” (p. 41), the “roughness” representing the interwoven nature of the three. Teachers who are tired of being asked “Why did you become a language teacher?” might find some responses here. People often want an answer that fits tidily under ‘born or made’ headings, in the same way as people try to explain the behaviour of incarcerated citizens. Introspective readers have plenty of fodder here for comparing and contrasting their own starting points in the profession with viewpoints from such varied sources as an American newspaper column, literature summaries, and the first person accounts mentioned already. In Part 3, on the ‘Core processes of second language teacher education’, my attention was caught by Chapter 9's title: ‘Knowledge generations in language teaching’. It opens with a century-old quote from Dewey, part of which suggests that prospective tasks are helped by retrospective elements. Freeman's thesis is that since the 1950s our understanding of language teaching can be described in terms of generations. For example, the third generation, from the late 1980s through the 1990s, is said to have started in an attempt “to position teachers as knowers of their own teaching” (p.170). These analyses seem like an original take on the usual overview of the changing decades moving through language teaching methods and approaches but without reference to what was happening in the wider educational world. It is sobering to be reminded, though, that the 1950s were not the start of our profession. For those who want to revisit a longer period, the author points to Kelly's 1969 “book with the modest title, Twenty-five Centuries of Language Teaching: 500 B.C. to 1969” (p. 164). It is tempting to source that one. Part 4, ‘A Design Theory’, has two chapters and three appendices. Chapter 12 revisits the first chapter with the argument “that second language teacher education has been largely defined by prescriptive ideas about what the content should be and how it should be taught” (p. 227). Here Freeman continues to explore one of his ongoing theses about similarities and differences between general teacher education and programmes designed for language teachers. Teacher educators who are intrigued by the book's content but short of time to translate it into interesting activities for teacher education groups could turn to the three appendices. Not surprisingly, given the content of the rest of the book, the suggestions are not quite ‘ready-to-go’. For most of us this is an advantage. Too often appended activities need some modification for specific groups yet the modification can ruin the author's intention. In this case, though, flexibility is admitted in the instructions. Thus, in the activity where participants are invited to contrast a live and a videotaped demonstration lesson (p. 266), for the former the participants could be either learners or observers while for the latter they would be viewers. There are also suggestions for thinking about which explanatory resource would be most appropriate while viewing: their own learning, their observed learning or descriptive information of the lesson. Then there is reference to additional online resources. From my perspective there was only one major gap in this extensive book and that was the topic of second language acquisition (SLA). The term is briefly mentioned twice but without expansion in Chapter 4. Surely knowing about this process should be part of the armour of a language teacher? Don't most university-based courses preparing language teachers include an SLA component? With that one proviso, the word ‘breathtaking’ came to my mind several times while reading this book. The author has drawn on decades of experience (his own and others'), of study and of thinking, to bring us an original book. One reading is not enough. Unlike some other books, this one will need to be read two or three times more before I can say that I am starting to understand its overall message and many sub-arguments. The process is certainly helped by the chapter introductions with their to-the-point language. Who will read this book apart from the educators of second language teachers who are named in the title? Unlike books addressed to an ‘inner circle’ such as language teachers, this one invites readership from professional developers in general teacher education. How many other subject disciplines have produced a comparative book? Are there similar sources for teachers of mathematics, history, science, to name just three? Perhaps it will be up to applied linguists to draw this one to the attention of their colleagues.
Book reviews / System 61 (2016) 110e120
113
Twenty years ago Freeman claimed that a better understanding of our profession must come through finding out what language teachers “do, how they think, what they know, and how they learn” (Freeman and Richards 1996: 1). Two decades on, we can read many answers to those questions. Reference Freeman, D., & Richards, J. C. (Eds.). (1996). Teacher learning in language teaching. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Marilyn Lewis Department of Applied Language Studies and Linguistics, The University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand E-mail address: [email protected]
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.system.2016.06.017
International perspectives on ELT classroom interaction, Christopher J. Jenks, Paul Seedhouse (Eds.). Palgrave MacMillan, Houndmills, Basingstoke, UK (2015). 254 pp.
In this volume's introductory chapter, the editors quote from a 1984 paper by Dick Allwright: “successful pedagogy, in any subject, necessarily involves the successful management of classroom interaction.” The content of this book reflects the fact that, thirty or so years later, ELT practitioners and researchers worldwide remain active in investigating the nature and importance of classroom interaction. The papers in this collection report research studies from such countries as Kenya, China, Germany, the United States and the United Kingdom, and focus on educational settings in primary schools, secondary schools, and in higher education. All readers interested in classroom interaction will find something of interest here. Personally, I found Chapter One (by Seedhouse and Jenks) to be particularly valuable. The main intention is to introduce the volume, but the chapter does far more and serves, in my view, as an excellent starting point for anyone thinking of doing research on classroom interaction, or for a teacher seeking to identify some background reading on the same subject. The whole chapter e and particularly the overview of the phenomena of interest to researchers in ELT classroom interaction e is studded with references to recent academic publications. The chapter also concludes (p. 9) with an observation that might startle older readers, but which is, I am sure prescient: “As journals increasingly move to electronic media, it seems likely that the normal presentation of data in CA (Conversation Analysis) studies will shift from written transcript to electronic presentation with transcript and graphics.” Even in the present volume, it is noticeable that several papers contain photos or sketches to capture gestures and eye contact. Chapter Two (Schwab) describes the use of Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) in a lower-middle school in Germany. The author sets the scene by noting that CLIL tends to be associated with “elitist or middle-class groups” but characterises the learners described here as “a lower set” from “less privileged backgrounds” (p. 12). Description and extracts from classroom transcripts give a taste of what happened, and Schwab is able to conclude that CLIL can indeed work well with “low achievers” and that all stakeholders (teachers, head teachers, students and parents) reacted positively to the two-year project. The author's view is that “language programmes that focus primarily on content rather than linguistic features therefore remain a challenging area of work e for teachers and researchers alike” (p.25). Gardner's Chapter Three is rooted in the long tradition of research in discourse analysis and is about turn-taking. More specifically, it describes research, conducted in early years classrooms in an Aboriginal school in Queensland, Australia, which focused on factors that allow learners (aged four to seven) to get into interaction with the teacher. Children in these classes, it seems, are often unsuccessful in their attempts to do so. This is sometimes because the teachers (speakers of Standard Australian English) take two or three terms to understand consistently what the learners are saying. However, Gardner is able to demonstrate that several other factors play a part here, including the fact that the children observed vary widely in their sensitivity to sequential boundaries in spoken discourse. In addition (p.47) “summons-answer sequences, while apparently simple, are in fact an important resource for enabling learning.” In Chapter Four, Jean Conteh provides insights into some of the forces at work inside and outside English as an Additional Language (EAL) primary school classrooms in England. It is dispiriting to learn that some teachers and policymakers in England apparently regard multilingualism in children as being problematic, despite growing research evidence of its benefits. The author also provides (p.50) a revealing anecdote about chatting to a group of “bright and articulate” 11 year-old children in a northern England primary school. When asked if they knew what ‘bilingual’ meant, the group was flummoxed, until one boy piped up with “Is it something to do with support?” The term ‘EAL’ itself is shown by Conteh to be frequently misleading, as learners so labelled often have English as the strongest language in their repertoires. The author uses well-chosen classroom transcripts to show complex “translanguaging practices” at work in England's multilingual primary classrooms and concludes (p.60) by hinting at “the pedagogic possibilities” of encouraging such practices. Citing Wegerif’s (2005) work
111
wears his (hungry) heart on his sleeve. Yet what do his fans actually listen to, the lyrics or the music? Ruth Finnegan stresses the importance of the ‘vocalized’ words of a song and the performance alike, but adds that “this is not to denigrate the significance e the wonder e of the verbal textualities” (p. 101). Au contraire. I believe it interesting enough that, in his SXSW keynote address at Austin, Texas, in 2012, Springsteen himself, referring to Dylan, should say that “he gave us the words [emphasis mine] to understand our hearts”. Because of their evocative nature, words carry willy-nilly many deeper elements with them which, as Jacques Derrida put it, differ and defer. It's the difference and distance between, on the one hand, reality, and on the other, mystery. It is also an issue that, somehow, this book deals with. Although she admits to having rejected Chomsky's “irrational, or at best unfounded, speculative abstractions” (p. 111) for most of her life, Ruth Finnegan possesses that perfect blend of courage, intellectual honesty, and style, that makes her say that, almost to her surprise, there's “some value in the idea of language as having some kind of existence prior to its formulation in performance” (p. 107). Following a short stay in hospital, and wondering “about just how language and imagination are linked” (p. 115), for example, she discovered “creative, created, literature” (p. 117) in her own dreams. “This must seem e as it does, indeed, to myself e the product of religious or mystical ideologies, paranormal, hallucinatory; certainly not the scientific hard evidence expected of linguistic analysis” (p. 117), and yet to explore and recount what is seen and heard in REM sleep is a challenge any anthropologist may find difficult to resist. After all, Chagall and Goya, just to name a couple of artists, did the same in their paintings and etchings, and so did many others in the fields of literature, music, cinema, even politics. Even the Bible. It would be impossible to give a detailed description of what recounting dreams is about. Dreams are shaped by cultural traditions. Ruth Finnegan was born in Derry, Northern Ireland, in 1933, at the a time when the world was either Catholic or Protestant, though she was lucky enough as to receive a non-sectarian upbringing. Given the tradition in which she grew up “and the biblical and Bunyan-rich Quaker school I attended, the language, cadences and images of the narratives cannot avoid being biblical” (p. 122). Therefore, her dreams are densely populated with angels and saints, and God struggling to create the world, while the music in the background is Bach's B Minor Mass, or “Amazing Grace”, or some Christmas carol. Where is Language? is a compelling book especially because of its author. Her prose and imagination are overflowing and magnificent, her stories enchanting. Adjectives always abound. Ruth Finnegan is in her early eighties and still young at heart. To paraphrase Eliot, a poet she often quotes, she's always struggling, always reaffirming, always resuming her march. Her journey into language has brought her on the threshold of what she calls “earthly heavenly arts”. Like Plato's Phaedo (XXXV) voiced a longing for some sort of stronger vessel, some divine revelation, to cross safely and securely the sea of meaning, she wonders alike: “Can it be that there is some original form of language […] wrought by men's hands, a product of the earth and of art e but surely e metaphorically if you prefer e of divine origin?” (p. 125). Well, I don't know. But “in the beginning was the Word” (John 1, 1). Emanuela Bossi Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Largo A. Gemelli 1, 20123 Milano, Italy Universita E-mail address: [email protected]
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.system.2016.06.012
Educating second language teachers, Donald Freeman. Oxford University Press, Oxford (2016). xxi þ 290 pp.
This most recent, almost 300 page work by Donald Freeman of the University of Michigan comes in the Oxford Applied Linguistics Series and is the result of many decades of practising and writing about the profession. Interestingly, for one who has contributed so much to language teacher education, the author explains in the preface that at the start of his language teaching career forty years ago he was untrained. That is one reason why his exploration of how people teach includes those who are actually untrained. They may, for instance, have fallen into the job through being native speakers in a context where trained language teachers are in short supply or where those with training have difficulty actually speaking the language. The book's intriguing sub-title (although this doesn't appear on the cover) is The same things done differently, which provides one possible filter for reading the contents. What is familiar? What is different? The contents come in a mixture of literature references, original first person accounts and the author's interpretations of these. The unattributed first person accounts are presumably the author's own reflections. Explaining the contents of this solid piece of work organisationally is straightforward thanks to the detailed and original labelling and sub-labelling of the book's four parts, thirteen chapters and multiple chapter parts. All these sections have clever, sometimes lengthy and often subtly worded titles, as in Part 1's first chapter, ‘Teaching (language) teaching’. The use of brackets reflects a point made in the Preface, and later throughout the book, that some aspects of teaching are more important than the lesson content, in our case language. As an example, he believes that “socialisation is a part of any teacher's learning” (p. xi).
112
Book reviews / System 61 (2016) 110e120
Less easy is explaining the contents' underlying connections. Be ready for original descriptors such as “the isomorphic relationship” (Ch. 1), “an ethnocognitive model” (Ch. 8) and “knowledge geographies” (Ch. 10) and literary allusions: “a tale of two conferences” in Ch. 4. Mentioning these is not supposed to put readers off. Quite the opposite. When we read for professional development it would be disappointing to find that we understood every point at first glance. Also there are chapters whose sub-headings are perfectly clear on the surface and yet on further digging become intriguingly thoughtprovoking. Because of the length and depth of the contents, the rest of this review will select some highlights from throughout the book to whet the appetite rather attempting to summarise the 100 subsections of all the chapters and appendices. In Part 1, ‘How people use what they know to do what they do in the language classroom’, Chapter 2 addresses ‘The central challenges in second language teacher education’. The three challenges Freeman suggests are defining language as content, identifying what is unique about language teaching, and thirdly discovering how language users and former language students learn to teach. His examples come from a range of languages and dialects including some unique features of Australian English. The idea of “language teaching identity” (pp. 34e36) may not be familiar to the new teacher and yet in time that person becomes socialised through a combination of classroom experience and use of the language. Are language teachers recognisable in public as a sub-species? To my shock, I was once asked at a social function by a total stranger (not a teacher), “Excuse me, but are you a teacher or do you live in …. ?”, naming one of the more affluent city suburbs. In Part 2, ‘Learning to be a language teacher’, I was particularly interested in Chapter 3 on ‘How people become language teachers: defining background knowledge’. Freeman considers three positions which be describes as a “rough continuum” (p. 41), the “roughness” representing the interwoven nature of the three. Teachers who are tired of being asked “Why did you become a language teacher?” might find some responses here. People often want an answer that fits tidily under ‘born or made’ headings, in the same way as people try to explain the behaviour of incarcerated citizens. Introspective readers have plenty of fodder here for comparing and contrasting their own starting points in the profession with viewpoints from such varied sources as an American newspaper column, literature summaries, and the first person accounts mentioned already. In Part 3, on the ‘Core processes of second language teacher education’, my attention was caught by Chapter 9's title: ‘Knowledge generations in language teaching’. It opens with a century-old quote from Dewey, part of which suggests that prospective tasks are helped by retrospective elements. Freeman's thesis is that since the 1950s our understanding of language teaching can be described in terms of generations. For example, the third generation, from the late 1980s through the 1990s, is said to have started in an attempt “to position teachers as knowers of their own teaching” (p.170). These analyses seem like an original take on the usual overview of the changing decades moving through language teaching methods and approaches but without reference to what was happening in the wider educational world. It is sobering to be reminded, though, that the 1950s were not the start of our profession. For those who want to revisit a longer period, the author points to Kelly's 1969 “book with the modest title, Twenty-five Centuries of Language Teaching: 500 B.C. to 1969” (p. 164). It is tempting to source that one. Part 4, ‘A Design Theory’, has two chapters and three appendices. Chapter 12 revisits the first chapter with the argument “that second language teacher education has been largely defined by prescriptive ideas about what the content should be and how it should be taught” (p. 227). Here Freeman continues to explore one of his ongoing theses about similarities and differences between general teacher education and programmes designed for language teachers. Teacher educators who are intrigued by the book's content but short of time to translate it into interesting activities for teacher education groups could turn to the three appendices. Not surprisingly, given the content of the rest of the book, the suggestions are not quite ‘ready-to-go’. For most of us this is an advantage. Too often appended activities need some modification for specific groups yet the modification can ruin the author's intention. In this case, though, flexibility is admitted in the instructions. Thus, in the activity where participants are invited to contrast a live and a videotaped demonstration lesson (p. 266), for the former the participants could be either learners or observers while for the latter they would be viewers. There are also suggestions for thinking about which explanatory resource would be most appropriate while viewing: their own learning, their observed learning or descriptive information of the lesson. Then there is reference to additional online resources. From my perspective there was only one major gap in this extensive book and that was the topic of second language acquisition (SLA). The term is briefly mentioned twice but without expansion in Chapter 4. Surely knowing about this process should be part of the armour of a language teacher? Don't most university-based courses preparing language teachers include an SLA component? With that one proviso, the word ‘breathtaking’ came to my mind several times while reading this book. The author has drawn on decades of experience (his own and others'), of study and of thinking, to bring us an original book. One reading is not enough. Unlike some other books, this one will need to be read two or three times more before I can say that I am starting to understand its overall message and many sub-arguments. The process is certainly helped by the chapter introductions with their to-the-point language. Who will read this book apart from the educators of second language teachers who are named in the title? Unlike books addressed to an ‘inner circle’ such as language teachers, this one invites readership from professional developers in general teacher education. How many other subject disciplines have produced a comparative book? Are there similar sources for teachers of mathematics, history, science, to name just three? Perhaps it will be up to applied linguists to draw this one to the attention of their colleagues.
Book reviews / System 61 (2016) 110e120
113
Twenty years ago Freeman claimed that a better understanding of our profession must come through finding out what language teachers “do, how they think, what they know, and how they learn” (Freeman and Richards 1996: 1). Two decades on, we can read many answers to those questions. Reference Freeman, D., & Richards, J. C. (Eds.). (1996). Teacher learning in language teaching. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Marilyn Lewis Department of Applied Language Studies and Linguistics, The University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand E-mail address: [email protected]
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.system.2016.06.017
International perspectives on ELT classroom interaction, Christopher J. Jenks, Paul Seedhouse (Eds.). Palgrave MacMillan, Houndmills, Basingstoke, UK (2015). 254 pp.
In this volume's introductory chapter, the editors quote from a 1984 paper by Dick Allwright: “successful pedagogy, in any subject, necessarily involves the successful management of classroom interaction.” The content of this book reflects the fact that, thirty or so years later, ELT practitioners and researchers worldwide remain active in investigating the nature and importance of classroom interaction. The papers in this collection report research studies from such countries as Kenya, China, Germany, the United States and the United Kingdom, and focus on educational settings in primary schools, secondary schools, and in higher education. All readers interested in classroom interaction will find something of interest here. Personally, I found Chapter One (by Seedhouse and Jenks) to be particularly valuable. The main intention is to introduce the volume, but the chapter does far more and serves, in my view, as an excellent starting point for anyone thinking of doing research on classroom interaction, or for a teacher seeking to identify some background reading on the same subject. The whole chapter e and particularly the overview of the phenomena of interest to researchers in ELT classroom interaction e is studded with references to recent academic publications. The chapter also concludes (p. 9) with an observation that might startle older readers, but which is, I am sure prescient: “As journals increasingly move to electronic media, it seems likely that the normal presentation of data in CA (Conversation Analysis) studies will shift from written transcript to electronic presentation with transcript and graphics.” Even in the present volume, it is noticeable that several papers contain photos or sketches to capture gestures and eye contact. Chapter Two (Schwab) describes the use of Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) in a lower-middle school in Germany. The author sets the scene by noting that CLIL tends to be associated with “elitist or middle-class groups” but characterises the learners described here as “a lower set” from “less privileged backgrounds” (p. 12). Description and extracts from classroom transcripts give a taste of what happened, and Schwab is able to conclude that CLIL can indeed work well with “low achievers” and that all stakeholders (teachers, head teachers, students and parents) reacted positively to the two-year project. The author's view is that “language programmes that focus primarily on content rather than linguistic features therefore remain a challenging area of work e for teachers and researchers alike” (p.25). Gardner's Chapter Three is rooted in the long tradition of research in discourse analysis and is about turn-taking. More specifically, it describes research, conducted in early years classrooms in an Aboriginal school in Queensland, Australia, which focused on factors that allow learners (aged four to seven) to get into interaction with the teacher. Children in these classes, it seems, are often unsuccessful in their attempts to do so. This is sometimes because the teachers (speakers of Standard Australian English) take two or three terms to understand consistently what the learners are saying. However, Gardner is able to demonstrate that several other factors play a part here, including the fact that the children observed vary widely in their sensitivity to sequential boundaries in spoken discourse. In addition (p.47) “summons-answer sequences, while apparently simple, are in fact an important resource for enabling learning.” In Chapter Four, Jean Conteh provides insights into some of the forces at work inside and outside English as an Additional Language (EAL) primary school classrooms in England. It is dispiriting to learn that some teachers and policymakers in England apparently regard multilingualism in children as being problematic, despite growing research evidence of its benefits. The author also provides (p.50) a revealing anecdote about chatting to a group of “bright and articulate” 11 year-old children in a northern England primary school. When asked if they knew what ‘bilingual’ meant, the group was flummoxed, until one boy piped up with “Is it something to do with support?” The term ‘EAL’ itself is shown by Conteh to be frequently misleading, as learners so labelled often have English as the strongest language in their repertoires. The author uses well-chosen classroom transcripts to show complex “translanguaging practices” at work in England's multilingual primary classrooms and concludes (p.60) by hinting at “the pedagogic possibilities” of encouraging such practices. Citing Wegerif’s (2005) work