Book Reviews Key Topics in Second Language Acquisition Editors:

Good textbooks dealing with issues involved in second language acquisition (SLA) are always in high demand among undergraduate, graduate and postgrad-uate students as well as their teachers, and yet, even though numerous titles are available on the market, publications of this kind are exceedingly difficult to come by. The most conspicuous shortcomings are typically related, among oth-ers things, to the abstruse level of discussion of the topics chosen, much too often grounded in theoretical positions to which the authors seem to have sworn allegiance, the use of technical language that may be hard to access for many less experienced readers, the desire to cover too much territory, the fre-quent failure to reconcile theory and practice, and even when such reconcilia-tion is undertaken, the blatant inapplicability of the pedagogical proposals of-fered to many instructional contexts. The book authored by Vivian Cook and David Singleton without doubt avoids all of these pitfalls, thus constituting a prime example of a well-written introduction to the undoubtedly highly com-plex, interdisciplinary and multifaceted domain of second language acquisitio