From the inception of research on second language acquisition (SLA), there has been an emphasis on the importance of studying authentic second language (L2) use in context. Selinker (1972) defined interlanguage as the linguistic system evidenced when adult second language learners attempted to express meanings in the language being learned. In attempting to model this underlying linguistic system, researchers were urged to use as data only

Thus, in its original formulation, the construct of “interlanguage” was construed to be the linguistic system revealed when learners were involved in authentic, situated L2 use. Although subsequent research has clearly used a much wider range of data than that originally envisioned by Selinker (1972), much – though not all – research in second language acquisition has continued to focus upon situated second language use. SLA theoreticians (e.g., Brown & Yule 1983a; Widdowson 1983) have provided useful frameworks for the study of contextualized second language use. However, it is important to note that theories of second language acquisition have been proposed that explicitly reject the value of authenticity of situational context for the study of second language acquisition (see Gregg 1990), and a great deal of SLA data has been gathered without particular regard for the influence of situational context (see Tarone 1988 for a discussion of this phenomenon).