Few of those involved in instructed language acquisition would disagree that, whatever be learners' aptitude or motivation, developing the ability to speak in a foreign language is an extremely difficult and arduous task. This is because the acquisition of speaking involves the mastery of the different language subsystems to the point that they can be employed automatically in spontaneous communication, simultaneous focus on comprehension and production, which is difficult to achieve because of limited attentional resources, as well as the impact of a wide range of social factors that often determine successful attainment of communicative goals. The challenge is further compounded in a situation in which learners have rather limited access to the target language both inside and outside the classroom, which is the norm in the majority of foreign language contexts. For this reason, there is a need to explore issues connected with teaching, learning and testing speaking with a view to translating the guidelines stemming from theoretical positions and research findings into feasible and context-sensitive pedagogical recommendations. Such is the rationale behind the present volume, which considers speaking in terms of influential theoretical perspectives, representative of both the psycholinguistic and sociolinguistic approaches, investigates various individual variables that can affect the development of speaking skills and reports the findings of research projects focusing on different aspects of instructed acquisition of speaking in a foreign language. The book brings together 20 contributions by Polish scholars, experts in the field of applied linguistics and second language acquisition specialists, which are divided into three parts according to their dominant theme, with similarity of topic rather than alphabetic order being the main principle of organization in each of them.

The first part, titled Theoretical perspectives on instructed acquisition of speaking, comprises six papers that strive to show how leading theories and hypotheses can be applied to explaining the processes of acquiring, producing and teaching different aspects of a foreign language.