teacher and student interactions can seldom end up as either being contrived or planned,merely experiencing the potential of the moment.

This thought provoking volume will strike a chord within the serious and the curiousalike due to the comprehensive nature of the material. The former will discover practicalmethods to implement critical pedagogical changes within everyday life, while the latterwill gain a greater awareness of existing inequalities. Each author that contributed to thisvolume desires the eradication of inequalities that exist within academia. Nonetheless, theyare not radical zealots screaming out for reform. To be more precise, they quietly postulatethat headway in this crucial area of language teaching and learning comes about by react-ing differently �in the moment�. Universally, there seems to be an understanding that theseprivate reactions will probably not alter society as a whole at that given moment, rather itis the unknown possibilities that drives these writers forward. Finally, within the currenttrend of globalization it is vital for practitioners to be aware of, and responsible for, imple-menting changes that will aid in the elimination of inequalities amongst all types of learn-ers (women, elderly, minorities, disabled) and strive for the equalization of power withineducational settings. At this point in time, it is still at the discretion of our institutions�policymakers to enact dramatic shifts away from the accepted norms that will facilitatesweeping social changes and, sorrowfully, I am rather skeptical of this occurring in thenear future.

Roger C. KenworthyOhio University, Hong Kong Programs, Hong Kong

E-mail address: hkadvisor@ohio.edu

doi:10.1016/j.system.2005.08.002

J.-M. Dewaele, A. Housen, W. Li (Eds.), Bilingualism: Beyond Basic Principles,

Multilingual Matters Ltd., Clevedon, 2003, ix + 233pp

We read in the Introduction that this volume has been written by leading scholars in thefield of bilingualism, honouring Hugo Baetens Beardsmore�s scholarship on the occasionof the 20th anniversary of his Bilingualism: Basic Principles and his 60th birthday. To thework of those scholars is added a Preface by M. Grover, the general editor of MultilingualMatters, which is both a personal and a professional note, and an epilogue by E. Lee onthe persona of Hugo Baetens Beardsmore.

The contributions cover issues of individual bilingualism, language policy, bilingualeducation, code-switching and language acquisition. The opening chapter is a reprint ofone of Baetens Beardsmore�s publications, in which he discusses four sets of fears evokedby bilingualism: parental, cultural, educational and politico-ideological fears. What maystrike the reader is that these fears have only partially subsided in the 15 years that haveelapsed since the paper was originally published, and that none of the author�s reflectionshave lost relevance.

In the second chapter Edwards reflects upon the relationship between language andidentity, both personal and social, and how a rigid distinction between personalityand social identity cannot be made. The point at issue is the significance of a type of

Book reviews / System 33 (2005) 637–642 639

bilingualism which links an individual to more than one ethnocultural community. Theauthor�s arguments compellingly bring home the point that the importance of being bilin-gual is, above all, social and psychological rather than linguistic.

In the next chapter Clyne offers a view of language in plurilinguals in which language isan end in itself. In doing so he emphasizes the significance of intrinsic motivation to themaintenance, acquisition and development of a language. Clyne relates intrinsic motiva-tion to a structural orientation in language learning and to metalinguistic awareness. Heexpresses a concern that with the current emphasis on communicative methods in schoolsthere may be little opportunity to develop linguistic interests and talents. One may fear,however, that those opportunities are often missed in the many classrooms around theworld which are still heavily structurally oriented.

In chapter four Cummins examines how power relations are infused into the public dis-course about bilingual education for minority students, especially in the United States.This discourse, Cummins argues, obscures the fact that research findings over the last25 years have consistently shown the benefits of bilingual programs for both minorityand majority children. This research is seen as supporting a set of theoretical principleswhich emphasize the importance of bilingual children�s mother tongue for their overallpersonal and educational development.

Chapters five and seven consider bilingual education in Brunei (a system of ‘‘bi-monolingualism’’). Through different examples of code-switching Martin (chapter 5) de-picts a situation in which classroom participants (students and teachers) cannot managecontent lessons in English alone. The author argues in favour of the recognition thatbilingual practices in the classroom are important as a way of accomplishing lessonsin multilingual contexts. He concludes by stressing the need for studies that providesome coherent framework for an appropriate bilingual methodology for a bilingual sys-tem. In chapter seven Jones traces the history of bilingual education in Brunei, pointingout both the problems that have arisen and the lessons that have been learnt, then dis-cusses and compares the linguistic situations of three other Southeast Asian countries:Singapore, Malaysia and the Philippines, which are also developing forms of bilingual-ism that include both English and the national languages. The chapter closes with areflection on the challenges, both educational and political, which these bilingual socie-ties face.

In chapter six Baker puts forward language action planning as a basic principle toachieve preservation of language. The author describes the language planning schema thathas evolved in Wales, and portrays the way in which a theory of language planning istranslated into very specific target-based language strategies concerning acquisition, sta-tus, and corpus planning, as well as opportunity, use and incentive planning. Of specialinterest are the innovative interventions aiming at encouraging family intergenerationaltransmission in the area of acquisition planning, held to be the most important foundationof language revival.

In chapter eight Wei and Milroy present a model that attempts to understand the pro-cess of language maintenance and language shift in relation to the concomitant processesof socio-cultural changes of the society. The authors illustrate the applicability of themodel, which is based on the work of political economists, to the sociolinguistic situationof Singapore. The chapter lays particular emphasis on the analysis of the linguistic marketforces: each language in Singapore has its specific market value, and the current change ofattitude towards code-switching is seen as the result of market competition.

640 Book reviews / System 33 (2005) 637–642

In the next chapter Gapta analyses the dialogues that appear in books for self-teachingof Malay from different periods. In addition to the more linguistic analysis, concerned withthe language varieties present in those books, the paper offers a historical, as well as asociolinguistic, analysis based on the features of the characters in the dialogue. For exam-ple, only post-colonial dialogues contain characters who are non-Malay locals learningMalay through the medium of English, a reflection of the impact of the spread of Englishin this period.

In chapter 10 Ludi discusses code-switching and translinguistic wording (learners� useof a word in the L1 motivated by lexical gaps). Whereas certain conceptions of a bilingualas a balanced speaker have traditionally ascribed the former to balanced bilinguals and thelatter to language learners, current definitions of a bilingual or plurilingual which do notrequire perfect and equal knowledge of the languages have challenged this distinction.Through the analysis of different examples, Ludi convincingly argues that the status ofthose translinguistic markers, as code-switching or translinguistic wording, is locallynegotiated and defined by speakers in interaction. In other words, bilinguality and exoling-uality are seen as the result of a social construction in and through interaction.

Chapter 11 is a contribution by Myers-Scotton within the framework of her own matrixlanguage frame. The paper introduces ‘‘classic code-switching’’ and ‘‘composite code-switching’’, and then discusses examples of flexibility in both types of code-switching,and of rigidity in classic code-switching. The relationship between both types is clarifiedin the concluding section. When socio-political conditions encourage speakers to shiftfrom one language to another, modifications of the source language of the matrix lan-guage frame begin to occur in favour of structures from the former embedded language.The combination of features from both languages results in composite code-switching,which shows a good deal of cross-linguistic flexibility. But the period of composite struc-tures is short-lived, because language in general strives for (monolingual) uniformity,which brings inflexibility again.

Genesee�s chapter succeeds in conveying a comprehensive picture of some of the mostsignificant issues in the field of bilingual acquisition. Against the bilingual-acquisition-as-deficit view, the author presents extant evidence from research on pre-natal and youngpost-natal infants which suggests that they possess the perceptual and memory capacitiesto acquire two languages as normally as one. Genesee also presents evidence suggestingthat children exposed to two languages simultaneously form differentiated linguistic sys-tems from the earliest stages of acquisition, and that they have the added capacity toco-ordinate their two grammars on-line in accordance with the grammatical constraintsof both languages during code-mixing.

The volume constitutes a valuable collection of papers on the topic of bilingualism,tackled from different angles and with different interests. It deals with issues at the individ-ual, educational and societal levels. While one of the strengths of the volume lies in itsdiversity, some topics and geographical regions are clearly more represented than others,probably because they are closer to the interests and the work of Baetens Beardsmore. Asa case in point bilingual language processing and representation issues are missing, andbilingual language acquisition is only represented in one chapter.

The generally high quality of the papers in this volume makes it a highly recommend-able book for readers interested in some or all aspects of bilingualism. Foreign languageteachers will also find elements for reflection in the chapters concerned with the motiva-tions and role of code-switching in the officially English-medium classrooms. In my case

Book reviews / System 33 (2005) 637–642 641

this was a reminder of the importance of paying attention to language proficiency in thecurrent attempts to integrate content and language in European bilingual classrooms, an-other area in which Baetens Beardsmore has also played a very important role. In sum,this volume is much more than a very appropriate gift for Baetens Beardsmore. It cele-brates bilingualism and its status as a worthy field of research and theoretical interest.

Carmen MunozDepartament de Filologia Anglesa i Alemanya

Universitat de Barcelona, Spain

E-mail address: munoz@ub.edudoi:10.1016/j.system.2005.08.001

642 Book reviews / System 33 (2005) 637–642