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In his recent TESOL Quarterly article (Vol. 22, No. 3, September 1988), Bernard Spolsky brings to the TESOL audience some of the latest modeling approaches available from the field of artificial intelligence. Although Spolsky provides a valuable service by presenting paradigms that have been used in theoretical modeling in other fields, he does not accomplish his goal without confounding different types of models.Spolsky introduces three types of models. He states that his forthcoming model of second language acquisition is a preference model. I will not comment on this here, since a full explanation of his preference model had not yet been published at the time of this writing.The second model, an expert system, is introduced as a metaphor for his theory of preferences. Expert systems, as he explains (p. 389), are computer models created to imitate certain decision-making or problem-solving algorithms used by humans. In this sense, his metaphor may be a bit confusing: To say that human behavior is THE FORUM 355

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