The present study offers an overview of research on the acquisition of sociopragmatic competence in a foreign language. Our starting point is the "hardware", i.e. the bilingual brain and the storage of different types of pragmatic and linguistic information in it. We then adopt a teacher's perpective by looking at how sociopragmatic aspects of the target language are integrated in language courses and language classes. We go on to consider a number of studies on the teaching, the acquisition and the use of sociolinguistic and pragmatic competence in the target language. A number of studies on the teaching, the acquisition and the use of sociolinguistic and pragmatic competence in the target language are then considered. Theoretical and didactical implications are presented in the final part of the study.

This article presents the structure of the Corpus International Ecologique de la Langue Française, an extensive corpus of spoken French that will soon be available on the Internet, from both an epistemological and empirical perspective. Explanations are given with regard to the ideas that guided the data collection (ecological approach, comparability of the different areas of the Francophonie and communication situations) and to the choices made ("communicative spaces" and "activity types") with a view to relevant analyses in various research fields (variation, interaction, multimodality, French in contact, oral syntax) and an attempt is made to fill existing gaps in the current corpus. The article further addresses the issue of building up a network of experts, problems that had to be solved during fieldwork in the different areas and questions concerning standardisation, archiving and publication of the collected data (audio and video recordings, transcriptions, metadata), whereupon several examples are presented for comparative analyses.

Bilingualism can be approached either according to a traditional approach of languages as separately identifiable, describable and usable objects or through the observation of ordinary speech practices, i.e. language in action, analysis viewing languages as socially-constructed, unstable objects, which can be variably categorized according to practical ends in the course of action. This approach has been chosen as the framework of the present paper for the analysis of bilingual interactions. Two kinds of observations are made: far from being merely analyzable in terms of code-switching, bilingual interaction has to be described in finer strata, from linguistic sub-systems to ways of speaking and addressing participants in which discourse is jointly realized through the adjustment of such resources to the on-going action. Thus embodying languages in meaning-making social practices leads to questioning drastically reducing and lethal models for language planning which are founded on academic approaches of bilingualism.

The languages spoken in Taiwan belong partly to the Austronesian linguistic family, and partly to the Chinese languages. The article deals with the state of standardization of the written languages. Besides, the historical origin and the differential status of the Austronesian and Han ethnic groups in the Taiwanese society are described. Language vitality is linked to the social characteristics of the ethnic groups. Finally, the question is raised whether multilingualism can be officially accepted.