Theories Pass. Learners and teachers remain

Abstract

The challenge facing foreign language (FL) learners and their teachers is enormous. To become successful, learners need to have at their disposal thousands of lexical items and chunks. They need to know what meanings and grammatical functions these items express, how to produce and how to combine them. They need to know when it is appropriate to use particular items and when it is not. They often need to apply all this information with little or no time for conscious reflection. And they need to master it in a fraction of the time available to first language learners.