The natural process of learning language is to concentrate on what we mean, not only on how we are saying it. What we mean is dependent upon the context in which we speak. This context in turn depends on the society or the speech-community in which our speech act takes place. To be a member of a speech community is to know what language behavior fits what situation. In this sense, language is essentially a function of society, and each society has the language it needs in order to function. If sociolinguistics has to refer to people and to their use of language, it cannot be divorced from linguistics or be studied as an autonomous science. The abstraction of sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics, and even pragmatics from language as people speak it has hampered the development of effective second language teaching methods. (Author/JB)