and the weak sense of performance tasks is a major issue in ESP testing for vocational placement and certification. What criteria shall we use to judge if a person is qualified or not to carry out a specific job in a second language setting?

The delicate, yet important question of the interaction of the raters and the use of the rating scales is discussed. Two questions which caught my interest, and which need to be more closely examined are a) the use of native speakers’ performance as the criteria for excellence, and b) the usefulness of rater training over time. McNamara does not provide a definite answer, but pinpoints the problematicity of the questions.

The book presents a careful introduction to the Rash Measurement model, which is found useful, and offers potential for gammg deeper insight into understanding what language performance is. The model is a good tool in the search for a construct of language performance, which is the basis for the validity of any test applied. However, the model is too complicated to be appreciated unless the reader possesses a rather high level of background knowledge of testing and the related statistics.

This book is a ‘must’ for the shelf of researchers of language testing, but not for the shelf of a language teacher who does not take a specific interest in summative vocational testing. The two books I have discussed complement each other. Bachman and Palmer’s book is more general in its discussion of language testing and the many related complex issues as seen today. McNamara’s book is much more focused on performance testing of ESP, and it succeeds in making the reader question many of the present approaches applied. The need to learn more about the construct of the object for testing, the importance of validity, is apparent in both books-a need that all stakeholders of testing should take part in.

References Gipps, C. 1994. Beyond Testing. London: The

Falmer Press. Nunan, D. 1990. ‘Action Research in the Class-

room’ in J. C. Richards and D. Nunan (eds.). Second Language Teacher Education. Cam- bridge: Cambridge University Press.

Smith, K. 1998. ‘Portfolio as a Learning and Assessment Tool in Language Teaching’. Paper presented at the TEA/ Odaf conference in Vienna, March 1998.

The reviewer Kari Smith is chair of the Education Department at the Oranim School of Education in Israel. She

222

has 18 years of experience in teaching and teacher training, and specializes in testing and assessment. Much of her recent work is in the field of alternative assessment of learning and language learning, such as self- and portfolio assessment. She is the co-ordinator of the IATEFL Testing, Evaluation, and Assessment (TEA) SIG.

Psychology for Language Teachers: a social constructivist approach M. Williams and R. L. Burden Cambridge University Press 224 pp. Paper £12.95 ISBN 0521 49880 5 Hardback £35.00 ISBN 0521 49528 8

The authors describe their book as being ‘about psychology for language teachers’ at primary, secondary, or tertiary levels, including teachers of EFL, and teachers of any other language, whether in the UK or overseas. They also see it as relevant to teacher trainers and to educational managers - a bold and universalist claim, which can be questioned in the light of current thinking about context and culture-based educational development. The book refreshingly avoids the kind of compartmentalization which treats teaching adults and teaching young learners as if they were taking place in different universes.

The book devotes two chapters to introducing its central orientation, ‘social constructivism’, two chapters to the teacher’s contribution and conceptions of the role of the teacher, three chapters to the learner, concerning the individual learner’s contribution, motivation, and learning strategies, and two chapters on the classroom, looking at learning tasks and the study of learning environments. It concludes with an integrating coda, ‘Putting it all together’.

Social constructivism is explained with the help of vignettes on the contributions of, among others, Skinner, Piaget, Bruner, Kelly, Vygotsky, Erikson, Maslow, Rogers, and in particular Feuerstein, as a model in which the learner’s view of him/herself and the task develop in interaction with teachers (‘significant other adults’), the task itself, and the learning environment. ‘Education becomes concerned with helping people to make their own meanings’ (p. 51). A constructivist view of teaching involves teachers making their own sense of the classroom and the task, and embracing the stance of the reflective practitioner. It can be contrasted with a skills- or competency-based view of teacher effectiveness. These chapters of educational philosophy set out in a well- informed and clear manner the basis of many attitudes that are received but often unanalysed, at least in EFL circles today. The highlight on the

Reviews

teacher, before the focus on the learner, is welcome, though it is regrettable (for the profession) that so few pieces of research concerning language teachers or language tasks are available to be discussed in this part of the book.

Under the heading ‘What can teachers do to promote learning?’ considerable space is devoted to Feuerstein’s theory of mediation, drawing parallels with the learner training argument within language teaching, and presenting empirical work, including some of the authors’ own, which evaluate teachers’ beliefs about their own performance as mediators.

The chapters on the learner attempt to clarify how individual learners differ, and to give useful background on ways of specifying these differences, in terms of self-directedness (a common theme throughout the book), attribution theory, and motivation. The discussion of motivation, in particular, draws deeply on educational sources (through the work of Ames and Harter) and applied linguistic ones (such as Gardner’s work, the ‘new agenda’ of Crookes and Schmidt, and the recent work of Dörnyei). This section is particularly successful in integrating the more narrowly foreign language- based work with the broader educational perspective.

The authors present a view of learning that roughly equates ‘how people go about learning something’ with the skills and strategies they use. From this, the reader might conclude that strategies are the content of a learning theory-an explanation of learning itself. This is a defensible view, but one which does not accord with the mainstream theoretical justification of learning strategies presented by O’Malley and Chamot (1990). Moreover, the purpose of these skills and strategies is viewed as making sense of the learner’s own learning. Thus, the reader is left with a (partial) vacuum; ‘learning’ itself is something else, perhaps even automatic and unconscious, which learners need to make sense of inside their own minds. The idea of the learner making sense of him/herself and the interacting environment is entirely consistent with the authors’ commitment to social constructivism. However, it is regrettable that they did not use this opportunity to take issue either with the received cognitive view of learning stemming from the work of Anderson (1983) or with the linguistic view of second language acquisition as an independent cognitive process, as developed by people working in the Universal grammar tradition (see Ellis (1994) for a comprehensive overview of such work).

Reviews

The following chapter on tasks makes well- documented inroads into a currently fashionable topic, presenting much-needed educational background which illuminates the more narrowly EFL-based developments in task-based learning, and provides a platform for evaluating these. However, there does seem to be a narrowing of the book’s focus here onto young learners, through the discussion of schemes for tasks designed to develop both linguistic and cognitive skills (again largely based on Feuerstein). While a good justification of task-based learning for adults might be that it engages the mature cognitive skills of the adult more successfully than other methods, the justification that it can teach adults to think, as is claimed for young learners, is a poor one.

Section 3 of this chapter attempts to show how some of the instruments from Feuerstein’s Instrumental Enrichment programme can be used for combining teaching language skills and thinking skills. The examples discussed involve time relations, comparisons, and spatial organization. The authors’ case that these materials can serve both aims at once looks plausible on a superficial consideration of the examples, since they look very like units in many beginners’ textbooks on spatial prepositions and prepositional phrases, comparisons, and time relations. However, their case would have been all the stronger if they had been able to include transcript excerpts of actual classes using the material, showing how learners and teachers negotiated the pitfalls of translating the visuals into specific foreign languages. This reviewer would be interested to know, for example, if the orientation in space visual (Figure 28. p. 181) in which a square garden with a house, a bench, a tree, and some flowers on each lateral has a boy (who can face all four different directions) in the middle, can be used to develop an understanding of the difference between the phrases ‘on the boy’s left’ and ‘on the left of the boy’. The authors quote some unpublished work by Warren in support of their claims, but this work was not available to this reviewer. In passing, it is possible that the unannounced mixing of the boy’s perspective and the readers’ perspective (in the grouping of the phrases ‘on the left/right of’ and ‘in front of/behind’) in this example could be used both to develop cognitive awareness and to draw attention to the interesting linguistic point that here is one (perhaps, in English, the only) instance of non-equivalence between the two genitive constructions; but clearly any language teacher using the material like this would have to exercise utmost care. Similar questions arise from a consideration of temporal relations. Cognitive exercises on past present and future time cannot

223

be translated without considerable modification into language exercises for languages which do not divide their tense systems into such domains - as English does not.

The last substantive chapter of the book looks at theories and research on learning environments. After carefully pointing out that learning style research is mainly about preferred conditions for learning rather than style of learning, the chapter continues with discussions of classroom structure and climate, introducing Hadfield’s work in language schools in the UK, and many of the ideas of the Americans Moos and Walberg, quoting some of Burden’s own research in this area, though again sadly not in language classes. A somewhat surprising omission in this chapter is any mention of the copious literature in applied linguistic journals using Interaction Analysis or its derivatives, or of the more interpretive studies using action research techniques, such as the work of Burns and Hood (1995) and Bailey and Nunan (1996).

Psychology for Language Teachers is a very useful treatment of a number of highly relevant areas of educational psychology for language teaching, and deserves to have wide currency, both as a volume for individual teachers’ bookshelves and as a course book for introductory courses. This reviewer found a number of ideas and approaches documented about which he had only a hazy conception, which were clearly explained and given a historical and intellectual context. The importance of the role of the teacher, as well as that of the learner in managing learning, resources, and developing autonomy, is highlighted by the treatment of mediation. The authors appear to intend that teachers using the book would derive from it material to enable them better to understand their students, the classroom, and in particular, their own teaching practice. This educational perspective is entirely welcome. Less fortunate, at least in the view of this reviewer, is the lack of discussion on the implications of their approach for the issues raised in more linguistically-oriented second language acquisition

research, for example on classroom processes, the development of second language syntax, vocabulary learning, second language use strategies, age and second language learning, L2 phonology, and others. The book successfully introduces and defends a particular and relevant approach; it would have been interesting to see, in a clearly worked out form, how that approach dealt with the major issues arising out of the dominant applied linguistic research area of the time (with the exception of motivation, which is treated in some detail).

The book is well produced and presented; the only error this reviewer could find in a brief search was Gattengo for Gattegno (pp. 37, 216, 236).

References Anderson J. R. 1983. The Architecture of Cogni-

tion. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Bailey, K. M. and D. Nunan. 1996. Voices from the Classroom. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Burns, A. and S. Hood. 1995. Teachers’ Voices. Sydney: National Centre for English Language Teaching Research, University of Macquarie.

Ellis, R. 1994. The Study of Second Language Acquisition. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

O’Malley, J. D. and A-U. Chamot. 1990. Learning Strategies in Second Language Acquisition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

The reviewer Steven McDonough is a lecturer in Applied Linguistics at the University of Essex. His own research interests are in the psychological bases of language learning, learner strategies, and evalua- tion, and he has published three books: Psychol- ogy in Foreign Language Teaching (George Allen and Unwin 1981; 2nd edn. Routledge 1986) Strategy and Skill in Learning a Foreign Language (Arnold 1995), and (with Jo McDonough) Research Methods for English Language Teachers (Arnold 1997).

224 Reviews