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This book and its accompanying volume, Variation in Second Language Acquisition: Psycholinguistic Issues, presents a number of solutions to the problems of studying variability in second language acquisition. The contributors combine insights from recent research in a number of fields: quantitative sociolinguistics, discourse analysis, pragmatics, psycholinguistics, language typology, social psychology, the sociology of language, ethnomethodology, pidgin-creole studies and second language acquisition. The diversity of these contributing fields exposes the richness of the approaches represented in these two volumes. Along with this diversity, a generalised view of second language acquisition, sensitive to both socio- and psycholinguistic issues begins to emerge. Such a view allows one to see more directly the relevance of second language acquisition studies to the central questions of language. By focusing on the need to incorporate variability into our understanding of the nature of language, the books make important contributions not only to methodological and theoretical issues in second language acquisition, but also to the role of these issues in general linguistics.