Do Your Students Notice Anything?(III)

So where are we now? It seems necessary to draw breath again and see where we have got to. Among the conclusions we are obliged to draw from the above discussion (and from our observation and reading as both classroom practitioners and classroom-based theorists at whatever level) are the following: Some language is clearly acquired subconsciously without any conscious attention being drawn to it either by the learner or by some other agent (such as the teacher). No other explanation will account for the fact that competent language learners seem to know things which there is no evidence of them ever having studied or thought about.