© Servicio de Publicaciones. Universidad de Murcia. All rights reserved. IJES, vol. 15 (2), 2015, pp. 97–102 Print ISSN: 1578-7044; Online ISSN: 1989-6131 International Journal of English Studies IJES UNIVERSITY OF MURCIA http://revistas.um.es/ijes Jiménez Catalán, Rosa María (Ed.). 2014. Lexical Availability in English and Spanish as a Second Language. New York: Springer. xiv + 205 pages. ISBN: 978-94-007-7157-4. IS’HAAQ AKBARIAN University of Qom, Iran Once a neglected area (Meara, 1980), vocabulary has increasingly emerged as an important area of research with a vast number of insights for language instruction. A quick inspection of the important scholarly journals provides evidence of the significance of vocabulary studies with various avenues of fresh research. Any journal in the field publishes one or more articles on vocabulary per year. Vocabulary has increasingly called the attention of scholars to such an extent that a specific journal, Vocabulary Learning and Instruction, was quite recently launched to publish the findings in the area. The volume under review here is still a further piece of evidence for the flourishing of the field of vocabulary studies. It focuses on lexical availability, a common concern of English and Spanish applied linguists nowadays. However, in the past decades, research on vocabulary “has followed a different path in English applied linguistics and Spanish applied linguistics” (p. v). Lexical availability is concerned with the words that people have in their minds, given in response to cue words on domains closely pertaining to daily life, such as town, countryside, parts of the body, clothes, and so on. It is considered as an important aspect of the lexical competence of language learners. THE CONTENTS The book is organized into a Preface, an opening chapter, two parts with empirical studies on English and Spanish as L1 and L2, respectively, and a closing chapter. The Preface by the editor, Jiménez Catalán, introduces the focus of the volume and sums up the contents. Next, López Morales in the opening chapter on “Lexical Availability Studies” sets the framework for the book; he defines a number of terms and notions associated with lexical availability such as ‘frequent’ and ‘available’ words, and traces the origin of studies of lexical availability back to French applied linguistics in the late 50s and then goes on to provide an outline of their development in Spanish applied linguistics. López Morales further states that, due to its