This volume brings together studies dealing with second language learning in contexts that provide intensive exposure to the target language. In doing so, it highlights the role of intensive exposure as a critical distinctive characteristic in the comparison of learning processes and outcomes from different learning contexts: naturalistic and foreign language instruction, stay abroad and at home, and extensive and intensive instruction programmes. The different chapters represent a wide range of learning contexts and types of learning, as well as different approaches that yield much needed evidence on the role of context of acquisition in second language learning.

This book presents a wide range of methodological perspectives on researching what teachers think and do in language teaching. It contains chapters by the editors and a leading teacher cognition researcher that highlight key themes, as well as eight case studies by new researchers, recounting their experience of designing and using data collection tools.

This collection brings together research on linguistic prescriptivism and social identities, in specific contemporary and historical contexts of cross-cultural contact and awareness. Providing multilingual and multidisciplinary perspectives on both institutional and informal mechanisms of prescriptivism, our contributors relate language norms to frameworks of identity including citizenship, nativeness, ethnicity, politics, and empire.

This book broaches the question of the social impact of age on language learners from a social constructionist perspective, thus filling a gap currently existing in the literature on age and second language acquisition.

This book describes second language learners’ development of pragmatic competence. It proposes an original theoretical framework combining a pragmatics and psycholinguistics approach, and uses a variety of research instruments, both quantitative and qualitative, to describe pragmatic development over one year. Situated in a bilingual university in Japan, the study reveals patterns of change across different pragmatic abilities among Japanese learners of English.