This volume in the series PRAGMATICS & LANGUAGE LEARNING offers fresh perspectives on standard topics such as the use and learning of speech acts and the pragmatic meanings of linguistic resources, while documenting researchers' increasing attention to pragmatics in computer-mediated communication and to conversation analysis as an analytical approach.

This issue of AILA Review contains the proceedings of a special symposium of the AILA Scientific Commission of Second Language Acquisition at the 2005 AILA Congress in Madison, WI, USA. Seven international experts in the field of SLA - Bardovi-Harlig, Dornyei, N. Ellis, R. Ellis, Gass, Kasper, Mackey - have been asked to provide a state of the art overview of their specialization tracks. The result is a concise summary of six distinct strands of second language acquisition studies that follow both linguistics-based and psychology-based approaches. Readers will not only find up-to-date reviews...