page, which offers various books for sale (unfortunately books unrelated to teaching
or researching motivation) but does not provide any of the links and services promised
in the book. Whatever the reason for this, the result is very regrettable. Pearson
Education/Longman should reconsider their marketing strategy on this front.
This book is well-suited for advanced students and those interested in researching
motivation. It is rich in well-researched information and interesting quotes from a
wide variety of sources and is thus an excellent starting point for both students and
researchers interested in the fascinating area of motivation. Some readers may find
themselves wishing that the book had more than ‘just’ 295 pages, as this would have
allowed more scope for D
€
ornyei to go into greater detail in places, but this is
probably inevitable given the complexity of the subject.
It is very plausible that this book will inspire, or indeed help to motivate, many
more students and young academics to turn their attention to this very fertile but
certainly not uncomplicated area of research.
Martin von Schilling
DaimlerChrysler AG
BS/Sprachendienst
HPC 502, D 70546
Stuttgart, Germany
E-mail address: mvs@daimlerchrysler.com
doi:10.1016/j.system.2004.06.002
Reading Concordances
John Sinclair; London: Longman, 2003, xx + 180 pp.
Prof. John Sinclair’s pioneering role in the field of ELT as editor-in-chief of the
Collins-Cobuild dictionaries and grammar is well known. Just as remarkable has
been his contribution to the development of modern language theory, particularly as
regards the relationship between grammar and lexis. He has successfully illustrated
how technological developments, principally the advent of electronic corpora and
the software to interrogate them, influence and refine perceptions of language and
how these clearer perceptions affect both linguistic theory and pedagogical practice.
The present volume also has a dual impetus: one pedagogical, the other theo-
retical. On one level, it is a textbook which aims to introduce corpus work to ‘stu-
dents, researchers and workers in the language’, more specifically, to show them how
to ‘interrogate a corpus in order to retrieve evidence that is relevant to a linguistic
enquiry‘ and then to refine those queries further until a ‘neatly organised body of
evidence’ (p. ix) is available as a report on the findings. On the second, a large
number of theoretical points are made, and despite the disclaimer that ‘they are not
gathered and organised into a specific stance’ (p. ix), the reader is guided in Socratic
question-answer fashion to an appreciation of what, elsewhere, Sinclair has called
Book reviews / System 32 (2004) 457–468 459