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Georgetown University Round Table on Languages and Linguistics (GURT) 2000: Linguistics, Language, and the Professions: Education, Law, Medicine, and Technology. James E. Alatis, Heidi E. Hamilton, and Ai-Hui Tan, eds. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2000. vi + 279 pp.
The goal of the 2000 Georgetown University Roundtable on Languages and Linguistics (GURT) was to investigate the potential interface of the linguistic sciences with various professional disciplines. The GURT 2000 conference and published proceedings are notable because in addition to furthering well-established interdisciplinary collaborations with education and medicine, several authors also address less familiar professional collaborations such as journalism, law, technology, businesses, speech-language pathology, and aviation. Linguistic anthropologists and other social scientists interested in applied research will find the entire volume to have significant practical and conceptual value. In fact, the best articles transcend the academic/applied dichotomy by providing compelling policy arguments that simultaneously contribute to key theoretical debates. True to the genre of conference proceedings, the volume is not organized into a unified project. However, the juxtaposition of the individual papers invites a critical theorization of the role of applied linguistics in the global economy.
Three ethnographic studies investigate the social and cognitive implications of the activity organization of learning. Laura Sterponi describes the historical trend in European American reading ideologies toward viewing reading as a private activity, and the tendency among educators to strongly devalue coparticipatory reading. In contrast, Sterponi demonstrates the cognitive complexity involved in children's spontaneous co-interpretation of a text. Leslie Moore discusses the contradictions between school and home language-learning practices in Cameroon. The French-only rule in Cameroon schools not only stigmatizes the vernaculars in the Mandara Mountains (where Moore did her fieldwork), but also inhibits the acquisition of French by conflicting with local practices of multilingual language learning. Whereas these studies present compelling evidence for the...