The Handbook of Informal Language Learning

31Last Words: Naming, Framing, and Challenging the Field

GEOFFREY SOCKETT AND DENYZE TOFFOLI

Introduction

As this volume brings to the fore, the language learner at the beginning of the twenty‐first century is quite different from the one at the end of the twentieth century, particularly in view of the technologies that one can use to access learning resources and the uses one makes of them. The main learning context of the 1980s and 1990s was the second language (L2) classroom or immersion in a foreign country. Classroom learning tended to involve groups with similar backgrounds in learning (depending on the grade level), shared resources (a teacher, a textbook, and the audiovisual resources that accompanied them, sometimes an audio‐active‐comparative language laboratory), and a set pace of progression through a program. For learners particularly committed to their learning, supplemental activities outside the classroom, for example listening to music in the foreign language or finding a pen pal to write to once or twice a month, or even accessing foreign television with closed captions (cf. Vanderplank) could be found. The arrival of the internet and a host of new technologies at the end of the 1990s and into the twenty‐first century completely changed the situation and opened the door to learning practices often (but not always) based on the same individual desires, motivations, and attractions as in the past, but providing entirely new resources for accessing different ...