Critical Reflections on Data in Second Language Acquisition

This chapter considers the topic of naturalistic data in L2 pragmatics research, discussing what ‘natural’ means, outlining different means of gathering natural data, and highlighting both the advantages and the challenges of working with data in natural settings. That discussion is followed by suggestions for collecting and analyzing naturalistic data based on the author’s experiences using a longitudinal corpus of naturalistic social interactions for the purpose of studying L2 pragmatics. More