Contemporary Approaches to Second Language Acquisition in Social Context contains new research in the area of social context and second language acquisition. In the past twenty years, an explosion of research is resulting in a better understanding of the total process of acquisition from multiple perspectives: cognitive, linguistic and social. Recently, the important implications of social factors in acquisition are being recognized. The book contains work by leading researchers in the field. It deals with an unusually wide variety of target and source languages, including English-speaking children acquiring Irish, Chinese adults acquiring Hungarian, Moroccan children acquiring Dutch and Dutch learners acquiring French.