Long (1991) distinguished two approaches to language teaching, which he called 'focus-on-forms' and 'focus-on-form'. In this article I discuss 'focus-on-form' from both a theoretical perspective by outlining the psycholinguistic rationale for this type of instruction and from a practical perspective by identifying the strategies that students and teachers can use when doing focus-on-form. I conclude by emphasizing the importance of including a focus-on-form in communicative language teaching in

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... order to facilitate incidental language learning and thus reject the commonly held view that teachers should not 'interfere' when students are performing a communicative task. I also suggest that 'focus-on-forms' and 'focus-onform' should be seen as complementary rather than oppositional approaches to teaching. The psycholinguistic rationale for a focus-on-form draws on a number of claims: 1. Meaning-focused instruction, while effective in developing fluent oral communication skills, does not result in a high level of linguistic or sociolinguistic competence. 2. Form-focused instruction consisting of a focus-on-forms may not result in learners being able to restructure their interlanguages. 3. Form-focused instruction consisting of a focus-on-form can enable learners to develop fluency along with accuracy because it creates the conditions for interlanguage restructuring to take place. I will examine each of these claims. There is plenty of evidence to demonstrate that learners are successful in learning how to communicate fluently and confidently as a result of content-based instruction (see, for example, reviews of the Canadian immersion studies in Genesee (1987) and Swain 1985)). Even in less favourable ESL or EFL learning contexts, instructional programmes designed to expose learners to the target language through communication of one kind or another have produced very favourable results. Lightbown (1992), for example, reports that eight-year children in New Brunswick,