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The social turn (Block 2003) has over the last twenty years spread through Second Language Acquisition research (SLA) and generated a number of approaches that have developed different accounts of how language learning relates to the social world of the learner. The literature on socially grounded approaches to SLA is large and diverse, and there is no point in outlining the many different research directions even with a broad brush. In this introduction I will make do with some general statements. Approaches such as socio-cultural theory (Lantolf and Appel 1994; Lantolf and Thorne 2006), language socialization (Watson-Gegeo 2004, Duff and Talmy 2011), identity theory (Norton 2000), sociolinguistic approaches (Young 1999, Tarone 2007), cultural theory (Kramsch 1993, 2000), the sociocognitive approach (Atkinson 2002, 2011) and CA for SLA (Kasper and Wagner 2011, 2014; Gardner and Wagner 2004 …