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This concluding chapter presents an overview of the speaking skill in the history of language teaching from the Grammar Translation Method to current Task-based Approach. It then moves on to the role of speaking in current usage-based perspectives, which view language as a social activity and where the social and the cognitive are no longer considered separate entities. As meaning is at the centre and language is considered to emerge out of usage, spoken interaction is promoted and speaking is considered both a social and a cognitive construct. We will observe how the different chapters in the volume fall within usage-based approaches and some of them provide usage-based inspired pedagogy. Finally, future research directions are proposed.

This chapter analyses the interpretation of boundary-crossing events in second language acquisition (SLA) to determine whether L2 learners are able to select the target-like option for the interpretation of motion events or whether, on the contrary, their choice reflects cross-linguistic influence (CLI) of their L1. The two groups participating in the study – thirty Spanish learners of L2 English and sixteen English first language (L1) speakers – were subjected to an experiment involving an interpretation task with L2 boundary-crossing events pictures. Findings indicate that Spanish L2 learners selected three possible constructions (manner verb + path satellite, path in verb + manner in satellite and a combination of both) in clear contrast to English L1 speakers who only selected one construction (manner verb + path satellite). CLI has also been found to regulate the type of boundary-crossing event selected, primarily in cases of motion INTO a bounded space in the horizontal axis.