Book Reviews 219

lingual education research that is as insightful about language and culture as it is

about the politics of social science. According to the author, "All of the articles
share the viewpoint that explanatory factors of BE (bilingual education) are to be
found in the social relationship of the linguistic groups in contact" (p. vii). They
include case examples, such as Las Escuelas Bilingues in Peru described in chap-
ter 1, and cross-case comparisons, such as those in chapters 2 and 3 dealing with
ethnic boundaries and bilingualism. Chapters 4, 6, and 7 review and critique as-
pects of BE, examining the ideological roots of researchers' choices of problem
and method, and illuminating why the field can seem fragmented and biased to
outsiders. Chapter 5 deals with biculturalism—what it is and how it might or
might not be an attainable goal of education. It questions which aspects of culture
are taught directly, which are acquired in use, and how temperament interacts
with learning to shape the cultural knowledge a person embraces.
The collection has several weaknesses in format and editing. Some papers
might be updated to include important recent work on the relationship between
language and cognition. There is also redundancy and insufficient cross-refer-
encing, with some chapters citing the same authors and cases or including the
same figures or verbatim quotes to make similar points.
Among the important problems raised in the book, several are resolved unsat-
isfactorily. The first concerns the appropriate relation between qualitative and
quantitative research in BE research. The second concerns how a student's first
language and culture should be treated inside the classroom to facilitate the learn-
ing of a second language while avoiding internal personal conflict or the loss of
a subordinate group's language and traditions in the process. Although the com-
plexity of each problem is detailed, the author seems, finally, to offer solutions
insufficient to that complexity. These concerns notwithstanding, the book is a
good resource for educators and social scientists wanting to review BE research.
It is also an astute critique of evaluation and policy research applicable to other
fields.

The Development of Second Language Proficiency. Birgit Harley, Patrick Allen,

Jim Cummins, and Merrill Swain, eds. The Cambridge Applied Linguistics Se-
ries. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. 248 pp. n.p.

DAVID SMITH
University of Alaska, Fairbanks

This book is the record of a symposium organized to present and critique the
results of the five-year Development of Bilingual Proficiency (DBP) study. With
the exception of one ethnographic component, the DBP project consisted of a
number of quantitative studies examining the development of second-language
proficiency in Canadian school-age children by teams from the Ontario Institute
for Studies in Education (OISE). There are three main sections in the book. Each
section consists of a summary paper by members of the research team, followed
by several discussion papers by invited scholars critiquing the findings and a re-
sponse from the DBP team. There is a fourth section that explores policy impli-
220 Journal of Linguistic Anthropology

cations, followed by a review of research on bilingualism by Wallace Lambert and

a short conclusion by G. Richard Tucker.
The research addressed four major issues: (1) the nature of language profi-
ciency, (2) the effect of classroom treatment on second-language learning, (3) the
relationship of social-environmental factors to bilingual proficiency, and (4) the
relationship between age and proficiency.
The nature of language proficiency was investigated through a factor analysis
study of 175 sixth-grade French immersion students and 23 native speakers of
French in a regular francophone school. This large effort was supplemented by
smaller studies of the uses of directional expressions and lexical proficiency using
subsets of the sample and an exploratory examination of methods of scoring oral
performance.
The researchers' concern with classroom treatment focused on the relationship
between experimental and analytic activities in classrooms. To examine this re-
lationship, the DBP project included several treatment studies. These included
the development and validation of the COLT (Communicative Orientation of
Language Teaching) observation scheme and COLT observation studies of core
French and French immersion classrooms. Presumably, core programs tend to be
analytic and immersion programs, experimental.
Social and individual factors were examined through a large-scale study of Por-
tuguese-Canadian students, a small study of school-age students from Portu-
guese homes, and an ethnographic study in a French-language elementary
school in Toronto.
The results of the study, only summarized in the volume under review, have
been widely reported in papers published by members of the DBP research team.
For the most part, the results themselves are not startling, adding only modestly
to our understanding of bilingual language development.
As Tucker points out in his conclusion, the DBP study is theory-driven, as op-
posed to practice-driven, research with the inherent perspectives and limitations
of the genre (p. 221). Operationalizing the social factors contributing to language
proficiency was a major design challenge. A major contribution of the volume is
in the candid and thoughtful discussion of this and other research issues by the
research team and the invited scholars. The volume thus becomes both a valuable
contribution to the literature on research methodology in this field and an implicit
call for complementary ethnographic studies.
The chapters by Tucker and Lambert are valuable. Tucker raises important
questions about the project itself and needs for future research, and Lambert pre-
sents a concise and cogent history of research in bilingualism.

Understanding Face-to-Face Interaction: Issues Linking Goals and Discourse.

Karen Tracy, ed. Communication Textbook Series. Hillsdale, N.J.: Lawrence
Erlbaum, 1991. 212 pp. $39.95 (cloth), $19.95 (paper)

KAREN A. LARSON
Gustavus Adolphus College