This chapter outlines the justification for the book and stresses the need to advance and enhance learners’ pragmatic independence in order to achieve successful (and overcome less successful) meaningful communication. Ongoing and lasting communicative development can be strengthened through learner/participant agency, pragmatic processing and investment as ways to assert a degree of ownership and control regarding actual and upcoming participation in additional-language encounters. This is described in terms of languaculture, transpragmatics and critical interactional ability. Languaculture highlights the intimate relationship between language and culture. Transpragmatics underscores interconnectedness between first-language and additional-language communicative resources and assets. Critical interactional ability reflects the actual, contextualised, day-to-day communicative skills needed to deal with and navigate interpersonal and transactional encounters. Such a framework builds on learners’ existing knowledge and experience (languaculture), active pragmatic resources and assets (transpragmatics) and the additional-language speakers’ ability to situate themselves with respect to others (relating and control). The book promotes a teaching approach which is centred on learner investment and his/her knowledge and experience of the world. This additional-language pedagogy recognises what participants bring to the teaching/learning environment as opposed to following conventional decontextualised practice which offer learners limited and controlled communicative knowledge.