ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at language as the possession of a group of people and on the L2 user as a member of a specific group. It describes some of the roles that second languages play in people’s lives and sees how these can be translated into goals of language teaching. It raises the fundamental questions of why we are teaching a second language and of what students want to be and what groups they want to belong to, things which teachers often neglect to think about in their busy teaching lives.
