María del Pilar García Mayo received her M.A. and Ph.D. in Linguistics from the University of Iowa (U.S.A). She is Full Professor of English Language and Linguistics at the University of the Basque Country (Spain). Her research interests are second language acquisition (in particular the acquisition of syntactic aspects of English as a second/foreign language from a generative perspective and input and interaction in formal language learning contexts) and second language research methodology. Her recent publications have focused on the acquisition of syntactic aspects of English as a third language and on issues related to interaction and focus on form in the foreign language classroom.

This book brings together research that makes use of tasks to examine oral interaction, written production, vocabulary and reading, lexical innovation and pragmatics in different formal language learning contexts and in different languages (English, French, German, Italian and Spanish).