ABSTRACT
This chapter deals with social and contextual variables and the role they play in language learning and production. Social and contextual factors are integrated into the process of learning and using language, and are, therefore, never separated from that process, as is seen in linguistic and psycholinguistic accounts. Regulation is a form of mediation. As children learn language, they also learn to regulate their activities linguistically. There are three stages of development on the way to self-regulation. There is another type of variation that may occur from the early stages—systematic variation. Systematic variation is evidenced when two or more sounds/grammatical forms vary contextually. Perhaps one of the most frequently investigated topics within the sociolinguistic-oriented second language acquisition literature concerns the differential results obtained as a function of data elicitation tasks. Language is not an isolated phenomenon that can be understood out of its social context. Consequently, learning is not situated in an individual’s cognition; it is not an intrapsychological process.
