Professor Alessandro Benati is the Head of the English Department at the American University of Sharjah, United Arab Emirates. He is honorary visiting professor at the University of York St John, UK. Alessandro has co-ordinated national and international high-impact research projects funded by the European Union, Leverhulme Trust, British Academy, Sassakawa Foundation, Japanese MEXT, and the School Challenge. He is a member of the AHRC Peer Review College and the REF Panel 2021.He is currently working on two monographs (Key Questions in Second Language Acquisition: An Introduction and Key Issues in Second Language Teaching) for Cambridge University Press. Sayoko Yamashita is Professor of Humanities and Social Sciences at Jissen Women’s University, Japan. She holds an Ed.D, and specializes in applied linguistics, SLA, and pragmatics. Her publications include Six Measures in JSL Pragmatics, “Politeness in classrooms-comparison between JSL and EFL classrooms” in Selected Research Papers in Applied Linguistics, and “Investigating interlanguage pragmatics ability” in Investigating Pragmatics in Foreign Language Learning, Teaching and Testing.