REVIEWS 275

Catherine Doughty and Jessica Williams (eds.): FOCUS ON FORM IN

CLASSROOM SECOND LANGUAGE ACQUISITION (The Cambridge
Applied Linguistics Series). Cambridge University Press, 1998.

What do second language learners notice and how can deliberate changes in
the learning environment, particularly changes to the linguistic input itself,
really a€ect the course of development? These are crucial questions for
acquisition researchers and teaching practitioners alike. Ever since Krashen
and his associates began to debate the role of consciousness in second
language acquisition in the mid-1970s, these questions have been in the
forefront of many people's minds. Krashen made a (by now well-known)
black-and-white distinction between two modes of learning, conscious and
subconscious, asserting that the former mode had no signi®cant role to play in
second language development (Krashen 1985). The main thrust of experi-
mental SLA has subsequently been, at least for a couple of decades, to track
the course of completely subconscious, intuitive processes; processes which,
by hypothesis, are not crucially (or at all) a€ected by deliberate actions on the
part of the learner or instructor. In the main, the role of consciousness as a
focus for experimental research has been avoided. Broadly generalizing, one
can say that those not espousing the Krashen position or those working
outside syntax have still not directly addressed issues of consciousness,
awareness, and attention. Even many of those working within syntax have
been taking a convenient position on the issue, for example, the `conscious-
ness-has-no-role' position, without further comment. The emergence of a
body of studies in recent years taking a more ®ne-grained approach to the
divide between `subconscious' and `conscious' learning is, therefore, a
welcome development (Sharwood Smith 1981, 1993; Tomlin and Villa 1994).
This particular book of readings may be situated at the interface between,
on the one hand, second language acquisition (SLA) studies and, on the other
hand, the applied linguistics of language teaching. It should, therefore, be of
great interest to a wide audience ranging from (a) those primarily interested
in the psychological and linguistic mechanisms underlying second language
learning (inside and outside the classroom) to (b) those who are more
interested in implications of SLA for language teaching. Potential readers
should nonetheless be warned that the book is not directly about classroom
applications and is very much about SLA. Nevertheless, the relevance to
teaching remains quite clear throughout. The last two contributions aim to
place the research ®ndings reported in the other chapters within a language
teaching context. In fact, to a greater or lesser extent, all the chapters make
reference to classroom practice. It should be said, by way of a warning, that
more questions are raised in this collection of readings than are resolved. The
careful reader with mainly pedagogical interests may ®nd more about the
great potential of this kind of research than actual solutions to problems.
276 REVIEWS

Those theoretically minded readers will come away with a sense of the
complexity of crucial issues such as noticing and attention and the very long
road ahead.
The book consists of ten chapters divided into three sections of roughly
equal length beginning with theoretical foundations (90 pp.), ending with
pedagogical implications, and with four chapters in the middle dealing with
experimental studies carried out in the classroom. Sections 1 and 3 range over
a wide variety of studies whereas the chapters in the middle section
concentrate on speci®c investigations.
The two ®rst contributions (the editors' opening article and the article by
Long and Robinson) set the scene well by making the theme of the book, as
announced in the book's title, more explicit as well as establishing some
important terms and concepts. Long and Robinson's chapter alone is worth
reading as an overview of the conceptual divide between some widely held
beliefs about second/foreign language teaching and the more cautious and
sceptical views of SLA researchers. Naturally, these two authors have their
own particular axe to grind. They hold a view somewhere between the two
extremes of traditional, explicit focus on `formS', as they put it, as opposed to
the straightforward provision of comprehensible input alone with no attempt
at all to focus on anything but the message (meaning). They dub their
approach `interactionist', a term that some will take exception to since one
can reasonably claim that all approaches to learning, including the `nativist'
ones, rest on the assumption that the learner's internal learning mechanisms
crucially need to interact with the information coming in from the `outside
world'. In any case, the views of these authors nicely re¯ect the growing
suspicion amongst many researchers schooled in the ®ndings of the 1970s and
1980s that, although mere exposure to language input without any
intervention at all may indeed lead to learning, there may still be more
ecient ways to facilitate development. Indeed, they claim that there are
studies that show this to be the case (pp. 21 and 23). It is precisely this sort of
message that will spur on language teachers to become more informed about
relevant SLA research ®ndings. The Long and Robinson chapter continues by
detailing various ways in which focus on `form'Ðthe intermittent focus on
target features in an otherwise completely meaning-centred set of activitiesÐ
might be usefully attempted in the classroom. They then look at some
experimental research ®ndings that bear on this issue.
On page 27, a very important point emerges in the discussion, almost
surreptitiously at ®rst, and readers of this book and of similar material in the
research literature would be well advised to keep this point consistently in
mind. This is the question of whether experimental ®ndings that show
signi®cant improvement in learning as a result of some treatment or other are
shown to still hold for learning in the longer term. Many studies do not provide
for post-tests to see if there is long-term retention: this, of course, provides
readers who are would-be researchers in this area with ample opportunity for
follow-up studies to check precisely this point. To their credit the authors in
 REVIEWS 277

this book generally take care to mention this factor when reporting results.
Nonetheless, a super®cial reading may too easily lead to over-hasty
conclusions, given that many readers will come to this book with
preconceived ideas about the merits or demerits of focusing on form.
The level of detail in the Long and Robinson chapter is pretty high, whereas
the opening chapter by the editors has much less. I would have welcomed a
slight redistribution of detail or, even better, a chapter which went more fully
into theoretical preliminaries. There is a real need for a more explicit and
separate discussion of essential terms like noticing, detection, and the like,
concepts which surface in the ®rst two chapters and also in the ®nal chapter of
Section 1, namely in DeKeyser's discussion of cognitive complexity, knowledge,
and automization. DeKeyser is concerned to supply a cognitive psychological
perspective to the discussion of implicit learning. Swain, in her contribution to
Section 1, makes the important point that output, learners' attempts to produce
language, can also serve as a trigger for noticing. This is both in the incidental
sense of noticing as well as in the more considered sense of post-hoc re¯ection by
the learner about formal features of the language he or she has produced.
Lack of space precludes a lengthier review of the studies in the middle
section (by, respectively, White, Doughty, and Varela, Williams and Evans,
and Harley). Suce it to say, this book is a de®nite must for SLA researchers
and teachers alike. The complex and detailed nature of much of the discussion
does require careful study, though. Also, the theoretical issues are not fully
¯eshed out and continually compete for the reader's attention with the
descriptive detail of the experimental studies. The ®nal chapter, by the editors,
is nonetheless a sterling attempt to create a coherent picture and ends with a
plea in favour of teacher intervention but with all the appropriate cautions
about not going back to focus on formS. Leaving learners to fend for
themselves, the non-interventionist approach (as re¯ected in, for example,
the comprehensible input approach of Krashen and associates), say the editors
somewhat boldly, is `inecient and unde®nable' (p. 261). I would take an
even more cautious line given the wealth of experimentation still to be done
and, indeed, given the equally pressing need for a much greater level of
re®nement of the theoretical bases. Still, having said that, I should add that I
have waited long for the arrival of a thought-provoking and scienti®cally
responsible book on how deliberately manipulating input might, after all,
a€ect second language development. The lasting e€ect, whatever the editors'
own views are, is to give readers a sense of why this area is both theoretically
challenging, and rich in implications for the teacher. I hope that this book is
the ®rst of many on this topic.

References
Krashen, S. 1985. The Input Hypothesis: Issues and Implications. London: Longman.
Sharwood Smith, M. 1981. `Consciousness-raising and the second language learner.' Applied
Linguistics 2/2: 159±68.
278 REVIEWS

Sharwood Smith, M. 1993. `Input enhancement in instructed second language acquisition:

theoretical bases.' Studies in Second Language Acquisition 15: 165±80.
Tomlin, R. and V. Villa. 1994. `Attention in cognitive science and second language acquisition.'
Studies in Second Language Acquisition 16: 183±203.

(Received November 1999)

Reviewed by Michael A. Sharwood Smith
Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh