In Culture Bound, Joyce Merrill Valdes provides a collection of articles representing aspects of current thinking on the teaching of culture in the language classroom. The book, one of the Cambridge Language Teaching Library series, is set out as a text, with questions following each article, and editorial commentary previewing each of the three groups of articles.Part I, Langauge, thought and culture, looks at aspects of the theories that underly teaching practice. Valdes has included Franz Boas on Language and thought, Robert Kaplan on Culture and the written language and William Acton and Judith Walker de Felix on Acculturation and mind. As the concluding article of Part I, Valdes reprints H. Douglas Brown's outstanding overview of some of the theoretical background to ESL teaching, an article well-suited to the ESL teacher in training. Brown introduces basic concepts such as acculturation, culture shock, social distance and others, and he briefly lays out associated theoretical explanations, including the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis.Part II, Cultural differences and similarities, includes general articles on this topic and four articles that contrast American culture with other cultures. All of these articles are reprinted from other publications. Robert Lado writes on How to compare two cultures, and Genelle Morain introduces the role of kinesics in cross-cultural understanding. Then Valdes gives us a group of cultural specific articles with Karl-Heinz Osterloh on the Third World, John C. Condon on Mexico, Orin D. Parker on the Middle East, and Alan Maley on China. These articles take different reference points. Condon, for example, organizes his analysis around values, and draws on anecdotes and quotations in an interesting and highly readable article. Parker focuses on the Middle Eastern student at home and in the U. S., and Maley follows many others in writing on the teaching of English in China. Nessa Wolfson's article on Compliments in cross-cultural perspective that concludes Part II draws on students' responses to a class assignment, and in doing so, acts as a kind of bridge to Part III. Valdes encourages the reader to compare the diverse approaches to cultural
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