The field of second language acquisition (SLA) research, since its inception, has been inextricably intertwined with pedagogical concerns. For many, if not all, researchers, the goal of SLA research is to produce insights and develop instructional strategies that may eventually improve the efficacy and efficiency of learning, something that learners at large have proven to be lacking. Although numerous strategies have indeed been developed over the years, the empirical research that has undergirded them, in the main, enacts and perpetuates a tradition that values learning as a product rather than a process. In that vein, the efficacy of the strategies has been construed and/or measured in terms of overtly manifested – oftentimes, superficial and form-oriented – changes in learners' behaviour (cf. Philp, 2003; Truscott, 1998). Often, though not always, statistical results are adduced to support one strategy over another. Individual-level, qualitative analyses of the linguistic data are, on the other hand, sparse, but when and where such analyses are undertaken, the results tend to show divergence rather than convergence (cf. Bardovi-Harlig, 2006a; Ellis & Larsen-Freeman, 2006; Larsen-Freeman, 2006a). The overall understanding that then ensues is one replete with contingency – the strategies are helpful for some learners but not for others, or they are helpful sometimes but not always. Nothing conclusive can therefore be said about any of them, and speculations have come in abundance.

Some of the speculations have even turned into clichés. For example, nowadays it is often said that second language (L2) learning is 'a complex enterprise'. Another impending cliché is that it is learners themselves, and not any external agents (i.e. a teacher, a researcher, or a textbook developer), who control the learning process. Importantly, such clichés are vacuous, empirically, for there has been little direct empirical proof of them. As a result of the product orientation in research referred to above, there has been a persistent absence in the literature of a fine-grained understanding of many fundamental issues pertaining to L2 learning as a process.