ABSTRACT
As we set out to examine the importance of sociolinguistics or of social factors more broadly, for the language learner, we must immediately recognize that to do so requires background knowledge in several different fields of inquiry. Minimally, one must be aware of certain basic facts about the acquisition of languages beyond the first, have an understanding of how social factors influence language and the methods through which these factors are studied, and also have current knowledge of research findings on effective methods for classroom instruction. To be clear, few are the experts in all three of these areas and, thus, we begin with the assumption that the readers of this volume possess a wide range of backgrounds and, quite frankly, of practical goals and expectations for this work. One might even ask how to approach such a diverse topic as the sociolinguistic competence of second language learners. It is for this reason that we begin this chapter with a discussion of why sociolinguistics matters for the second language learner and why we, as researchers and language teachers, should seek to understand the impact of social factors on the language learner more fully.
