This course will engage learners in critical dialogue and collaboration relating to conducting, sharing and improving primary research on how language is used in different communicative contexts and under different communicative demands. By the end of the course, learners should be able to: (1) design original studies of learner language use, and (2) conduct appropriate analyses and report on findings which document L2 variation in different contexts and under different communicative conditions. In the synchronous class sessions, learners will present original findings based on their analyses and pose questions to group relating to how to improve these analyses. They will also summarize and discuss published studies (theoretical or empirical) which exemplify the types of analyses used with L2 learner discourse. The asynchronous discussion forums will be used to discuss the background readings the core text for the course and to post examples of problematic discourse for collaborative discussion and analysis.  The first assignment will be developing an original task set for collecting L2 learner language in different contexts or under different communicative conditions. The second assignment will then be to use this task set to collect data, analyze it based on the principles covered in the course, interpret the findings, and posit questions for future empirical work.