Social Contexts of Second Language Acquisition

An important aspect of learning a language involves the concept of communicative competence, which is defined as "what a speaker needs to know to communicate appropriately within a particular language community". Basically, simply comprehending and accurately producing vocabulary and grammatical structures is not the only important aspect of second language acquisition; it is also necessary to understand how to use language appropriately, including when to speak and when not to, and how to speak to who. How competent a person becomes at a language varies from person to person and is influenced by many factors on a microsocial and macrosocial level.

On a microsocial level, the communicative context in which the speaker learns to produce language. The communicative context includes:
Linguistic Contexts: elements of form and function associated with the variable element.

Psychological Contexts: factors associated with the amount of attention which is being given to language form during production, the level of automaticity versus control in processing, or the intellectual demands of a particular task.

Microsocial Contexts: features of setting/situation and interaction which relate to communicative events within which language is being produced, interpreted, and negotiated, including level of formality and participants' relationship to one another, and whether the interaction is public or intimate.

Research on microsocial contexts is based on Accommodation Theory which asserts that speakers change their language production to sound more like whomever they're speaking to.

Macrosocial factors that influence language learning include: Social Categories, Circumstances of Learning, and

Global and national status of L1 and L2: Languages serve to facilitate political identification and cohesion and as well as play roles in times of empire-building. A language's status can influence not only people's willingness to use a language, but also the amount of resources available to help them learn an language.

Boundaries and identities: A language can serve to reinforce identities and boundaries between groups of people, but can also be used as a tool to to participate in another group by learning their language.

Institutional forces and constraints: Power, authority and influence are related to SLA as far as language-related social control, access to knowledge, and linguistic privilege.