Gabriele Kasper (Dr. phil.) is Professor of Second Language Studies at the University of Hawai'i, where she teaches in the M.A. in ESL, Ph.D. in SLA, and Advanced Graduate Certificate in Second Language Studies programs. Her most recent books are Misunderstanding in Social Life: Discourse Approaches to Problematic Talk, co-edited with Juliane House and Steven Ross (2003) and Pragmatics in Language Teaching, co-edited with Ken Rose (2001). Other books include Communication Strategies (Kasper & Kellerman, Eds., 1997), Interlanguage Pragmatics (Kasper & Blum-Kulka, Eds., 1993), and Cross-cultural Pragmatics (Blum-Kulka, House, & Kasper, Eds., 1989).

Kenneth R. Rose holds a Ph.D. in applied linguistics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is an Associate Professor in the Department of English and Communication at City University of Hong Kong, where he teaches in the BATESL and MATESL programs, and supervises M.Phil. and Ph.D. students. Before coming to Hong Kong, he taught at universities in Japan and the United States. His main research interests are interlanguage pragmatics and research methods. He has co-edited one book, Pragmatics in Language Teaching (Rose & Kasper, Eds., 2001), and his work has appeared in journals such as Applied Linguistics; IRAL; JALT Journal; Journal of Pragmatics; Language, Culture and Curriculum; Language Learning; and Studies in Second Language Acquisition, as well as in a number of edited volumes.