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one which has the least novelty. But any season which sees two such excellent new books as those of Barlow and of Jones and Fortescue is a publishing spring.

REFERENCES

CAMERON, K., DODD, M. and RAHTZ, Q. (1986) Computers and Modern Language Studies. Chichester: Ellis Horwood.

HIGGINS, J. (ed.) (1986): CALL A European View. System (special issue) 14(2).

LEECH, G. and CANDLIN, C. (eds) (1986) Computers in English Language Teaching and Research. Harlow, Essex: Longman Group.

John Higgins

University of Bristol School of Education 35 Berkely Square Bristol BS8 1JA United Kingdom

DEMAIZIERE, FRANCOISE, L’Enseignement assist& d’ordinateur. Paris: Editions Ophrys, 1986, 576 pp., FF 150.00.

This imposing-looking tome is the first doctoral thesis in the field of computer-assisted language learning to be presented in France. Francoise Demaiziere is almost certainly the best known French worker in the field, and this book, resulting as it does from no less than fifteen years experience developing CALL materials for the teaching of English at the University of Paris VII, may be seen as a representative expression of the “state of the art” in France. For this reason alone it deserves to be taken seriously. Several of the assumptions on which it is based, and several of the issues raised, however, are of intrinsic interest and importance.

MS Demaiziere’s work, both this thesis and the CALL materials described in it, is firmly based on the linguistic theory of “op&rations honciatives” elaborated by A. Culioli. Before briefly discussing this theory in itself it is worth drawing attention to the advantage of such an approach, and comparing the authority which it lends to MS Demaiziere’s description of her “didacticiels” with the theoretical poverty and amateurish air of many of the CALL materials that are at present commercially available in Britain and the U.S.A.

The theory of “opkrations honciatives” (the expression is virtually untranslateable: discourse operations?, utterance actions?) is widely influential in French linguistics today, as can be seen from the amount of interesting research, mostly in the field of socio- linguistics, that it has inspired in recent years. However, is is still little known outside France, largely because of the difficulty for a non-French speaker of understanding it in the absence of anything resembling a general introduction.

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It is essentially a linguistics of discourse. Culioli’s aim is not to present a model of verbal communication, but to account for the complexity of the phenomena that communication gives rise to. “Language is . . . a mode of thought, one representational system among other systems of representation, but it can function for communicative purposes because it is inter-individually regulated and stable. In fact it is a communicable form of thought.” It follows that any piece of language must have what Firth called the “implication of utterance”: someone must say or have said it to someone, at some place, some time, else it cannot be meaningful. More particularly, the various linguistic elements and features (including tense, aspect, determination and so on) only exist in order to situate the utterance, and they can only be explained in terms of the situation. Consequently, words, for example, or other linguistic elements, do not have meanings. Rather, utterances only take on meanings to the extent that the operations that they effect are differentiated.

MS Demaiziere gives only the most cursory account of Professor Culioli’s theory, referring the reader to other publications, most of them extremely difficult to find. The theory is however implicit all through the book and explains the emphasis laid on certain points. For example, she devotes what might seem an inordinate amount of space to the bizarre “situation knonciative” of the learner seated in front of a computer (who is s/he interacting with? etc.) Though this might at first sight look like so much philosophico-theoretical pin- dancing it shows how a conscious choice has led to the adoption of a friendly but impersonal style for the exercises developed, neither peremptory nor facetious, and avoiding the mickey- mouse anthropomorphism of much current CALL material.

How is all this theory reflected in the CALL materials that MS Demaiziere has produced in her position as leader of the most prestigious team of workers in the field in France? It must be said that some of the features of the materials described here that are most striking to a British observer do not seem at first sight to follow on as an ineluctable consequence of the theory of “op&ations Pnonciatives”. For example the exclusively tutorial, analytical approach, the reliance on explicit grammatical explanation, the use of French as a metalanguage (for teaching English); these are features that might be defended, or criticized, in the light of other linguistic theories.

The theoretical basis is however apparent in two things, in the importance given to the actual linguistic content of the exercises, and in the nature of the, very full, explanations offered. MS Demaizike is clearly not a programmer, there is no sign here of presentational ingenuity or technical gimmickry. All the exercises described seem to have been constructed using one authoring system (called DIANE) and are all limited to the straight tutorial mode. What is impressive about them is the way they take advantage of DIANE’s ability to allow for a huge variety of branching pathways through the material, and the amount of explanation and illustration that is included. The material is, apparently, all designed for students of English of relatively advanced level: the difficult areas that anyone who has taught English to French speakers will recognize (Simple Present/-ING Present, MUST/NEED, THE/THAT, etc.) are included. In each case the explanations presented are clearly original, they are very definitely not the computerized representation of some standard textbook, as is all too often the case.

The influence of the theory of “opkrations Pnonciatives” is, as one would expect, most

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clearly evident in the explanatory material itself. In each case distinctions, such as those of aspect or between modal verbs, are presented in terms of a context, and of the difference in meaning that switching two terms can bring to the whole context. It is here that one is inclined to question tentatively whether the theory is really being applied strictly: there is an absence of authentic text and many of the contexts proposed are short, and they have a rather synthetic flavour; they were obviously composed for a purely pedagogic purpose and the implication of their utterance often seems marginal.

As has been remarked above, the materials described, of which only very brief illustrative samples are cited in the text, are of an exclusively tutorial nature. In the early chapters MS Demaiziere does briefly discuss other types of CALL, mentioning text-mutilation programs, language games and quoting Seymour Papert. However it is clear that though her knowledge of the field is extremely wide, and catholic, she sees the tutorial mode as the essential model for all serious computer-assisted learning. She can speak about it with considerable authority in view of the volume of material that has been produced by the Paris team over the years. The thoroughness of the method by which all these “didacticiels” have been constructed is also impressive. There is no laid down authoring procedure, as with TICCIT, speeding up production of the exercise material at the cost of forcing the teacher/author to fit the knowledge content into a fixed matrix. Instead, the exercises are constantly tested on learners while in the course of elaboration, so as to make sure that every possible mistake, every misunderstanding or other learner-response will have been anticipated by the finished exercise. The result is an extremely flexible, user-friendly type of tutorial, with a very large number of possible pathways through the content. A sophisticated keyword analysis of learners’ responses increases this flexibility and user-friendliness.

The term “didacticiel”, whose refrigerating overtones are so off-putting at first sight, even takes on a humanistic colour in the light of the, may one say it?, very un-French empiricism of this down-to-earth method of working. In other words the austere, strictly tutorial form is belied by the essentially learner-centred approach adopted, as it also is by the quantity of patient explanation included, and the tone in which it is presented.

It remains that the unique approach favoured by MS Demaizitre is the tutorial, with all the methodological disadvantages that this implies. The author is aware of some of these, since she mentions the danger for the learner of “un enfermement dans le mode d’analyse et le cheminement de I’enseignant”. She does not however seriously consider any alternative approach nor face the fact that while explicit and exhaustive explanation of grammatical detail may teach a learner about the language, it is as yet to be shown that it is the best way of teaching the language itself. This rather single-minded attitude is found in the short shrift given to other linguistic theories. The audio-lingual is dismissed in a few lines. This is probably fair enough in 1987, but it is disappointing to see the Notional-Functional school brushed aside with two scornful quotations (from French colleagues). Neither Wilkins nor Widdowson figure in the Bibliography.

A major difficulty with tutorial-style CALL materials is their integration in a syllabus. It is a pity, therefore, that there is not more information here about the way in which the “‘didacticiels” described are used, how they are disseminated, how they fit beside traditional

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methods and how they are received and by what type of teachers. One would also like some information about the hardware used and about the everyday nuts-and-bolts problems that must exist as much in France as elsewhere.

This is probably too much to ask for, considering the nature of the book. What we have here is the text of a doctoral dissertation with all the overloading of academic paraphernalia that this implies; it is surprisingly readable when one considers this fact.

Brian Farrington

University of Aberdeen Language Laboratory Regent Walk King’s College Old Aberdeen AB9 2UB United Kingdom

BUTLER, CHRISTOPHER, Computers in Linguistics. Oxford: Blackwell, 1986,266 pp., g9.95.

BUTLER, CHRISTOPHER, Statistics in Linguistics. Oxford: Blackwell, 1986, 214 pp., f8.95.

Compared to other subjects in the humanities, the use of computers in linguistics has a relatively long history and dates back to the 1950s when the computer began to establish its position primarily in machine translation. After a euphoric start and some disillusionment on the limitedness of formal techniques within such a complex thing as natural language, it is widely accepted nowadays that the computer is a useful tool and that every student of linguistics should have some knowledge of how to use it. One of the reasons for the present popularity of using computers is, of course, the wide-spread use of personal computers. Whereas until a couple of years ago using computers meant sharing computertime with others at the computer center of a university, most schools and university departments are now equipped with Big Brother Blue personal computers, Apple, Macintoshes or whatever.

Consequently, there is obviously some demand for introductory literature on how to deal with computers in linguistics. The need is twofold. Besides a comprehensive synopsis of the current use of computers in the various linguistic areas, students have to get some experience on how to program the machine themselves in order to carry out their own studies or at least to get a feeling for the formal restrictions involved in computing. Indeed, Butler’s aim is “to provide students and researchers in language studies with a survey of the uses of computers in the analysis of natural language texts, and with some practical tools for carrying out such analysis”, as the cover states. This statement already indicates that the main focus throughout the book is on what you may call “literary computing”, i.e. for example, analysing textual material for stylistic surveys.