This chapter begins with the statement that all talk happens somewhere, somehow, at some time and is produced by somebody for some purpose, and the approach that practice theorists have taken is that talk and its context are inseparable. The challenges that face an analyst of practice are then to describe the context, describe the talk, and explain the relationship between talk and context. The author begins with a discussion of the distinction between talk and context and with Bakhtin's insights into sentences and utterances. The discussion then moves to descriptions of four ways of approaching that challenge are reviewed in recent work by a number of researchers. Liu's (2000) analysis of one child's acquisition of English with different interlocutors is presented as an instance of an applied linguistic approach to practice. Toohey's (2000) longitudinal ethnographic analysis of a class of minority-language children in English-medium classrooms in Canada moves the focus of attention from language to context. Garrett and Young's (2009) study is of a single learner and her emotional responses to her language learning experience and extends the notion of context to include learners' emotions. Finally, studies by Baquedano-Lopez (1997/2001), Conteh (2007), Gebhard (2002/2004), and Shameem (2007) describe clearly how ethnic cultural ideologies are transmitted through language instruction. (Contains 1 figure, 1 table, and 4 notes.)