This book examines L2 learners' development of pragmatic competence - the appropriate language use in a social context. It reveals patterns of development across different aspects of pragmatic abilities measured over one year and presents the participants' experiences and the individual characteristics that shaped their developmental trajectories.

Naoko Taguchi is an associate professor in the Modern Languages Department at Carnegie Mellon University where she teaches courses on SLA, pragmatics, and Japanese language and culture. She is a Fulbright scholar, and the recipient of the 2004 MLJ-ACTFL Emma Birkmaier Outstanding Dissertation Award. She edited the volume Pragmatic Competence and is co-editing the volume Technology in Interlanguage Pragmatics Research and Teaching. She is currently on the editorial board of Japanese SLA.