What is the classroom starting point for foreign language teachers promoting FLL?
The whole issue of the interface of pedagogy with language teaching has been much discussed but little resolved (e.g. Urr, n.d.). Many of the conflicts have been less about students than about turf wars between disciplines (Miyagawa, 1995). This paper is concerned with only one aspect: fractional language learning. Explicitly treating FLL in the classroom is a very complex and mostly unexplored dimension. Here I will offer a few initial comments. 8.1 If language teachers wish to make effective use of FLL as a philosophy and goal for instruction, they face the rather difficult task of establishing the existing FLL achievement of each student. Formal test results that students bring to a course are unlikely to be of much help in this process. 8.2 The scope and nature of L2 that students have some grasp of is not something that they can articulate themselves, especially in the pre-production stage of learning (which defines most L2 students in mass teaching institutions). 8.3 Frequent in-
