Sixteen international academics contribute 12 chapters offering a broad and balanced overview of the current state-of-the-art in instructed task research, dealing with an interesting variety of target and source languages, modes, contexts and settings, and a range of aspects of task features from multiple complementary perspectives. The text includes studies that use tasks to examine oral interaction, written production, vocabulary and reading, lexical innovation and pragmatics in different formal language learning contexts and in different languages. The text also offers guidelines for task classification, sequencing and design. For students and professionals in second language acquisition research, and professionals in language pedagogy and curriculum design. Distributed in the U.S. by UTP Distribution. Annotation ©2007 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)