APPRAISING RESEARCH IN SECOND LANGUAGE LEARNING: A PRACTICAL APPROACH TO CRITICAL ANALYSIS OF QUANTITATIVE RESEARCH

APPRAISING RESEARCH IN SECOND LANGUAGE LEARNING: A PRACTICAL APPROACH TO CRITICAL ANALYSIS OF QUANTITATIVE RESEARCH. Graeme Keith Porte. Amsterdam: Benjamins, 2002. Pp. xx + 268. $78.00 cloth, $29.95 paper. The author states in the preface that this book is intended “to guide student and novice researchers through their critical reading of a research paper in the field of second language learning” (p. ix). It does an admirable job of this and, in fact, should be required reading for every language researcher. Porte emphasizes that the role of the book is not to guide readers toward critical judgments of research articles but rather to constructive reading as consumers of research—which may, in turn, lead to well-designed and presented research studies of their own. To meet these goals, Porte divides the book into two parts: the first portion of the text, the textbook (pp. 3–149), guides readers through analyses of the various components of research studies, and the second portion, the workbook (pp. 153–246), leads readers through a detailed analysis of two sample studies.