Book ReviewsM. Pienemann & Jörg-U. Kessler (eds.) 2011, Studying ProcessabilityTheory, Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 179 pages, ISBN 9789027203014

Reviewed by Vivian Cook Newcastle University

This book is intended as an introductory textbook on processability theory(PT) for MA students who have ‘a basic familiarity with issues in linguisticsand psycholinguistics’. Its primary use is then presumably for students on anMA module in processability theory, rather than say for more general readerswho want a quick overview of the theory. It is a demonstration of the rigourand scope of PT for second language acquisition (SLA), developed over morethan thirty years. It is interesting these days to see an approach where syntaxis taken to be the core of second language acquisition and which relies on theanalysis of sentences actually produced by L2 (second language) learners.

Part I, called ‘The facts’, has two chapters by Manfred Pienemann. Chapter1 ‘Developmental schedules’ explains the six syntactic stages of SLArecognised by PT. Chapter 2 ‘Learner variation’ shows how the way each stageis instantiated can vary between individuals, particularly in terms of theelements that are omitted from the sentence. This part lays down the basis forPT established in Pienemann’s classic 1980s papers.

Part II, called ‘The theory’, has five chapters, three by Manfred Pienemannalone, two with co-authors. Chapter 3 ‘The psycholinguistic basis of PT’links PT to Levelt’s 1989 ‘model of language generation’, developing theprocessability hierarchy which expands the learner’s sentences upwardsto include more and more of the phrase structure from single wordsto embedded clauses and introduces Bresnan’s 1982 lexical-functionalgrammar (LFG) as the underpinning syntactic theory. Chapter 4 ‘Explainingdevelopmental schedules’ interprets the six stages of Chapter 1 in terms of theprocessing stages and syntax described in Chapter 3, amplifying each stagewith the processes that it involves and the aspects of morphology and syntaxthat it deals with. Chapter 5 with Mathias Lieber ‘Explaining learner variation’similarly shows that the variation within a stage is constrained by therequirements of the processability hierarchy. Chapter 6, ‘L1 transfer’, presentsevidence that transfer from the first language to the second too has to obey theconstraints of the processability hierarchy. Chapter 7, with Jörg-U. Kessler‘Research methodology’, describes ways of collecting language samples frominterviews and tasks. This part then shows the expansion of the base for PT in

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linguistics and the reinforcement of its key ideas of stages and variationthrough research.

Part III called ‘Applying PT to other contexts’ has three chapters. Chapter8, by Satomi Kawaguchi ‘Japanese as a second language’, shows how PTpredicts the sequence of acquisition of passive and word order for L2 learners.Chapter 9, by Ingo Plag ‘Pidgins and creoles’, accounts for properties of thesetypes of language in terms of PT. Chapter 10, by Yuki Itani-Adams ‘Bilingualfirst language acquisition’, describes the use of the PT as a measuringinstrument to compare the acquisition of the two languages of an English/Japanese child. This part shows how PT is not restricted to English or Germanbut can deal with typologically different languages.

Part IV called ‘Practical applications’ consists of two chapters. Chapter 11,by Kessler and Liebner ‘Diagnosing L2 development’, looks at a way ofassessing the PT development of a learner using a tool called rapid profile.Chapter 12, by Kessler, Liebner and Fethi Mansouri ‘Teaching’, seesapplication as utilising the idea of teachability – ‘you can’t skip stages’ - basedon the PT stages within a task-based methodology. This part goes some way toshowing that PT can be used in applied linguistics rather than being simplytheory.

So is this a suitable textbook for an MA course? Much of it is extremelycondensed – LFG, one of the less familiar syntactic theories and one of themost difficult is for instance presented in six dense pages. Sometimes it isallusive – while Levelt’s 1989 model is discussed, the famous model is notreproduced nor its more recent incarnation in Levelt, Roelofs and Meyer(1999), only its adaptations to PT. Virtually no links are made to otherapproaches to SLA in the 21st century, save perhaps for task-based learning; itmay be hard for the student to put PT in the context of other SLA research. Ithas fairly sparse amounts of data for students to analyse or tasks other than the‘Study questions’ which appear at the end of each chapter. In a way itresembles twelve set-piece sequential lectures. Doubtless it will be chosen byteachers who are already committed to the theory and so can fill it out for thestudents in various ways. For example Chapter 1 assumes a familiarity with‘Do-fronting’, ‘copula inversion’ and ‘Aux-2nd’, Chapter 3 drops in the term‘XP-adjunction’, all of which would need considerable explanation for today’sMA students, who seldom get a prior exposure to such terms.

The publishers have not been altogether helpful to students. The contentspage does not number chapters. Page 10 refers to sentences (3b)–(7b), whilethe only visible sentences are labelled (3a)–(7a). Some references are missing,e.g. Baker (1994) (p. 120), Smith (2006) (p. 120) and Yip & Matthews (2000)(p. 122). Titles of journal articles are not translated into English for exampleDoi and Yoshioka (1990), Elsner and Kessler (2011) and Laman (1936) – fewstudents probably span Japanese, German and French. The textbook willdoubtless be essential for those teaching courses on PT; it is considerablyeasier to follow than the original books and papers and presents a unifiedcontemporary account of PT. Its wide-reaching content provides a useful,

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albeit dense, overview for comparative outsiders trying to get a quick ideaof what PT is about.

One of the dangers of current SLA research is its fragmentation intodifferent factions, such as ‘generative’ SLA, conversational analysis (CA) andPT. Mostly these groups have their own separate gatherings where they do notneed to spell out the basics to an uninformed audience. PT has its ownprinciples and ideas, its own self-contained methodology and theory, therationale for which is not always obvious to outsiders. For example researchmethodology means transcribed ‘data’ from interviews and tasks. It neverexplains why such performance data are adequate evidence for a theoryconcerned with processing (or indeed why the ‘artificial’ data of researchinterviews and tasks is appropriate rather than ‘natural’ L2 use). Levelt’smodel after all is based on experiments, not transcripts; ‘we have developedand tested our notions almost exclusively by means of reaction time (RT)research’ (Levelt et al. 1999: 2). Probably the vast majority of psycholinguisticwork into language processing involves experiments of one kind or another,exemplified for instance by Pienemann’s quondam co-worker HaraldClahsen (say Clahsen, Felser, Neubauer, Sato and Silva 2010). In other wordsthe book fails to motivate the underlying methodology for those who do notshare its ethos – just as the methodologies of CA and generative SLA areclosed books to the uninitiated.

As with much SLA research, there is still an ambiguity about whether thetarget of second language acquisition is the native speaker or the successful L2user. Chapter 1 cogently spells out the 6 stages of L2 syntactic developmentfrom learner data but slips in remarks such as ‘this structure obviouslydeviates markedly from that of native English’, ‘a non-target-like structure’,and ‘the perspective of the target language’: the target for L2 learners is thenthe native speaker. Chapter 2 talks of ‘simplification of the target language bythe learner’; as Corder (1980) pointed out a generation ago, simplification isdefined with reference to the native speaker’s whole language, which isprecisely what the learner does not possess: what is a simplification of thenative speaker’s language to the analyst is a creation of a language to thelearner. ‘Simplification of the target language by the learner’ is effectively‘differences in the L2 learner’s sentence from the native’s, as measured by thenative language system’: the native language is the touchstone for the learner’slanguage. One of the underlying research assumptions in PT is the concept of‘obligatory context’ for syntactic elements (Brown 1973), not specificallydiscussed in this book but implicit throughout; this essentially compares thelearner’s actual sentence to one that a native speaker would putativelyproduce. The example on page 5 relates the actual learner-produced ‘Whereyou have lost it?’ to the possible native ‘Where have you lost it?’ and ‘Wheredid you lose it?’, claiming ‘all WH-questions formed at this stage will lead togrammatical errors’: the learner’s sentence is then measured against thenative’s and any deviation is regarded as grammatical error. Hence thedevelopmental stages of PT are related to the native speaker at every point.

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Chapter 11 describes ‘Diagnosing language development’ through linguisticprofiling. The starting point for linguistic profiling was indeed LARSP(Crystal, Fletcher and Garman 1976), but this was primarily a tool for speechtherapists to diagnose deviations from standard syntactic development inchildren. All citations for ‘diagnose’ in the Oxford English Dictionary concerndisease; talking of the ‘diagnosis’ of L2 development implies there issomething wrong with normal SLA developments, presumably its deviationfrom native speech.

To many, the difficulty with the PT is its implicit reliance on nativespeakers rather than on L2 users as unique people in their own right withtheir own ways of processing sentences both in the second language and thefirst. Its monolingual perspective on second language acquisition does not fit,for good or for ill, with multilingual perspectives in which native speakerprocessing of syntactic structures is only one of the possible ways of handlinga language rather than the ideal that all other users strive to approximate.

References

Brown, R. (1973) A first language: the early stages. London: Allen and Unwin.Clahsen, H., C. Felser, K. Neubauer, M. Sato and R. Silva (2010) Morphological

structure in native and non-native language processing. Language Learning 60:1,21–43.

Corder, S. P. (1980) Formal simplicity and functional simplification in second languageacquisition. In R. Anderson (ed.,) New dimensions in second language acquisitionresearch. Rowley, MA: Newbury House.

Crystal, D., P. Fletcher and M. Garman (1976) The grammatical analysis of languagedisability. London: Edward Arnold.

Levelt, W. J. M., A. Roelofs and A. S. Meyer (1999) A theory of lexical access in speechproduction. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 22.1: 1–38.

email: vivian.cook@ncl.ac.uk

Rosa M. Manchón 2011, Learning-to-write and Writing-to-Learn in anAdditional Language. Amsterdam, John Benjamins. ISBN 9789027213037 (Hb) ISBN 978902721304 4 (Pb)

Reviewed by Ernesto Macaro University of Oxford

As the title and the rear cover blurb suggest, this book is an attempt at thepioneering endeavour of bringing together two areas of second languageeducation research. The first is the learning to write (LW) research field whichis exemplified by the teaching context of writing English for academicpurposes; where English is not the first language of the students. Here the

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