particular detail: the Language and Brain section here deals with lateralisation,again five pages, including an interesting, but technically ambitious, experimentaltask involving dichotic listening. Part D, the most extensive section, contains sets ofshort readings from original sources: the section on Language and the Brain herecontains two extracts from Terrence Deacon’s The Symbolic Species. In total, thisgives us about 20 pages on language and the brain- good enough for an introductorytext but nowhere near enough to tease out the real complexities of this area and,more importantly, nowhere near enough to get students thinking creatively aboutthe issues, or to discuss the technologies that make things like brain scans possible.The same approach is applied to the other areas. The principle of probing deeperand deeper in each section is a clever idea, making difficult areas more readilyaccessible, and definitely helping to avoid the superficiality that characterises otherbooks in this area. I very much liked the way that you can read this book on sev-eral different levels. However, I thought that the choice of readings was a bit odd:they relied heavily on secondary sources and summaries rather than originalexperimental studies. This reinforced the idea of the psycholinguistic canon thatyou have to know, rather than psycholinguistics as an empirical scientific endea-vour that you have to do.Will this book turn students into committed empiricalists? Probably not on its

own. What you need for that is some genuine first hand data collection experience,in which students are given the chance to collect real data in real experimentswhere the answers are not known in advance, and where the outcomes really mat-ter both to the students and their supervisors, and ideally to the experimentalsubjects too. However, my guess is that if you used this book as a second yeartextbook and then ran a hands-on experimental psycholinguistics module for thirdyear students that taught data handling, basic statistics and large doses of cynicismabout experimental reports in textbooks, then you might have a winning combi-nation on your hands.

Paul MearaCentre for Applied Language Studies

University of Wales Swansea, Singleton Park,Swansea SA2 8PP, UK

E-mail address: p.m.meara@swansea.ac.uk

doi:10.1016/j.system.2003.11.002

Teaching and Researching Listening

M. Rost; Longman, Harlow, 2002, xii+309 pages

Teaching and Researching Listening follows its predecessors in the LongmanTeaching and Researching series in presenting teaching principles and practice in anaccessible format, with key concepts and quotes clearly highlighted, and with a widerange of suggestions for further research. Its aims are to ‘motivate informed teachingand research in listening, in either L1 or L2’.

Book reviews / System 32 (2004) 121–131 125

The book is divided into four sections. In the first section (‘Defining listening’),Rost presents key concepts involved in listening. He starts with a chapter eachdevoted to neurological, linguistic, pragmatic and psycholinguistic processing. Hethen goes on to introduce natural language processing and to outline the conceptsinvolved in the development of listening in L1 and L2 acquisition. In the secondsection (‘Teaching listening’), he first presents principles of instructional design andSLA that have implications for the teaching of listening. He then sketches the ‘prob-ably futile’ search for the best method of teaching listening, and examines features oforal input that are important for the teaching of listening. There follow chapters oninstructional design and methods of assessment in which Rost discusses key issues andprinciples. In the third section (‘Researching listening’), Rost presents a series of 15action research projects, ranging from ‘listening in daily life’ to ‘comprehension andmemory’ to ‘designing a self-access listening centre’. Each project begins with a set ofinitial questions that could be asked (e.g. ‘What problems do L2 listeners have in aca-demic lectures?’), describes example studies and ends with a sequence of suggestedactions that could make up a ‘project plan’. The final section (‘Exploring listening’)provides annotated lists of useful books, websites and other listening resources.Rereading Rost’s earlier book in a Longman Applied Linguistics Series (Rost,

1990), I was immediately struck by how much more user-friendly this book appears,with text highlighted by shading and broken up by ‘concept boxes’, ‘quote boxes’,horizontal lines and white space. This approach to layout could be criticised forbreaking up the flow of a text, but I generally found it helpful to take time out fromreading a long piece of text to read a short related text box—particularly where themain text involved complex ideas which were exemplified in the concept box.Underneath the surface, there are several other features that I like about the book:the four sections that the book is divided into make it relatively easy for you to findyour way around; the book presents teaching principles, issues of text selection,research questions/plans and resource information which will be of immediate helpto teachers and researchers; and because of its broad coverage, is always likely toyield nuggets of new information to the browsing reader.One consequence of viewing listening from a wide range of perspectives and

addressing both teaching and research is that something has to be left out. Everyonewill have their own preferences for inclusion and exclusion with a book like this. Mypreference would have been for more attention to controversial issues in the field.Being introduced to some of the key issues and being led to evaluate the claims ofothers helps readers develop their own standpoint, reflect on their teaching practiceand produce their own research questions. As Rost himself says, ‘‘We most oftenundertake research in an attempt to reconcile competing explanations of somephenomenon or to elaborate descriptions of that phenomenon’’ (p. 202).Several controversial issues are presented, and presented clearly—for example, the

question of what is meant by ‘authentic’ in listening materials, and what type ofauthenticity is appropriate for learners. However, the following three importantissues are absent from the book, or not addressed directly:(a) teaching versus testing/providing practice opportunities—as several people

have pointed out, many listening tasks provide practice but do not help the

126 Book reviews / System 32 (2004) 121–131

learner to identify and address particular difficulties that they had in listening tothe text.(b) bottom-up versus top-down processing—Rost (p. 220) rightly points out that

it is important to develop bottom-up processing skills and not just teach learnershow to compensate for their listening difficulties, but does not set out the debate.Recent publications (including this book) have tended to put emphasis on top-downstrategies such as inferencing, overlooking research into L1 reading which showsthat proficient readers recognise words faster and rely less on context than poorreaders, and that proficient reading is not the ‘guessing game’ it was claimed to be.The online nature of listening, with little time to backtrack, surely makes speedyword recognition even more important than with reading. Very few teaching mate-rials nowadays help learners to improve their ability to decode the stream of speech(and therefore free up processing capacity for top-down strategies). I would like tohave seen this debate given greater emphasis in the book.(c) process versus product, or the ‘Strategies’ debate—Rost gives a fair amount of

space to strategies, but does not mention that the benefits of strategy training are notuniversally accepted. An example of the debate as it relates to listening strategies canbe seen in the 2000 issue of the ELT Journal. Presentation of these key issues couldhave run throughout the book, from modelling the listening process, to teachingprinciples, to teaching applications, to research foci and methodologies. This wouldhave allowed us to evaluate competing theories and to relate these theories to ourown teaching and researching situations.Although the book has a clear Defining–Teaching–Researching–Exploring macro-

structure, I think I would have found it easier to follow up on one theme in the threemain sections if the same term had been used throughout. For example, chapters on theprocess of recognising words from the stream of speech in each of the first three sectionsare respectively titled ‘recognising words’, ‘intensive listening’ and ‘speech processing’.Within chapters, more signalling between sections would also have been helpful. In thechapter on instructional design, for example, we are in turn presented with threetypes of listening, four principles of instructional design and four procedures for lis-tening instruction, but the sections follow on from each other without any signallingof what is coming next or how the sections relate to or differ from each other. Andwithin sections, there is sometimes little in-text reference to concept and quote boxes(particularly in pp. 17–29, where concept boxes and diagrams make up more than halfof the page space, but are not referred to in the text). As a result, I did not alwaysknow why I was reading something, or how it fit into the overall picture.Finally, some minor criticisms. Most of the time Rost does indeed write in a ‘highly

accessible style’, as the back-cover blurb proclaims, but technical terms were notalways explained—I found this especially problematic in the early chapters on pro-cesses, where terms were coming thick and fast. Apart from the glossary, and the listof resources in Section 4, one source that might have led to a fuller explanation of keyterms and concepts is the companion website for the book (www.booksites.net/rost)—potentially a very useful resource, and one that I hope other publishers followup on. Unfortunately, the site, along with the companion websites for other titles inthe Applied Linguistics in Action series, no longer appeared to be working when I

Book reviews / System 32 (2004) 121–131 127

tried to access it. Another source of further information is of course the biblio-graphy. It is difficult to avoid one or two bibliographic errors, but there are severalin this case. For example, Phil Benson, whose ‘Teaching and Researching Auton-omy in Language Learning’ appeared in 2001 in the same Longman series (but isomitted from the bibliography in this book), is incorrectly cited four times on fourpages and is ascribed a quotation which seems to have come from a pre-publicationdraft. These are relatively minor matters but they can be off-putting for those whoare trying to chase up references and suggest that the final stages of proofreadingwere somewhat rushed.The comments and suggestions I have made are possibly those of someone look-

ing for the impossible: the perfect book—comprehensive, thought-provoking, theo-retical but practical, outward-looking and linking, well laid out and clearlyorganised, easy to read, easy on the eye, painstakingly proofread and edited—andpacked into a mere 300 pages! This book does pretty well in most regards and verywell in some. As I write it is the only recent book (as opposed to a collection ofarticles) that tackles both the teaching and researching of L1/L2 listening, and is thefirst such book that I am aware of since Rost (1990). It covers most of the majorareas (including some that you will not have thought about before) and provides aplethora of jumping-off points that should set the inquisitive reader thinking abouttheir own teaching of listening. Budding teacher-researchers in particular will findthe research questions and project plans really useful in generating ideas forexploratory and action research—in other words, in motivating informed teachingand research in listening.

Richard PembertonLanguage Centre, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology

Clear Water Bay, Kowloon, Hong KongE-mail address: lcrpem@ust.hk

doi:10.1016/j.system.2003.11.004

Teaching and Researching Computer-assisted Language Learning

K. Beatty; Applied Linguistics in Action Series; Longman, London, 2003, xii+259pages

Although there is no explicit statement to that effect, the audience of Ken Beatty’sbook appears to be anyone interested in carrying out research in the field of CALLwho is not actually doing so yet. That is the conclusion to be drawn from the con-tents and the tone of the book. In terms of contents, Teaching and ResearchingComputer-assisted Language Learning can best be described as an introductorytextbook and its style is didactic rather than analytical. The readership picture thisconjures up is one of postgraduate students (perhaps preparing for a dissertation onthe topic) and teachers engaged in action research.

128 Book reviews / System 32 (2004) 121–131