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Over the past 25 years, the focus on form proposal (Long, 1991) has served as the guiding framework for much of the research on classroom-based second language (L2) acquisition. A plethora of studies have been conducted to assess its efficacy as it is implemented in a variety of settings, from laboratories to classrooms. In this essay we use examples from published studies to illustrate that focus on form is, in practice, largely focusing on the surface accuracy of learners’ utterances at the expense of their intended meaning.