Seeking a justification for skill-building

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Skill-Building, the idea that we acquire language by first learning rules (or discovering them) and then practicing them in output, is the basis for pedagogy in most language classrooms throughout the world. Several kinds of evidence, however, show that Skill-Building at best plays only a small and peripheral role: we can acquire language without it, the means needed for Skill-Building (output, correction) are scarce, and the rules to be learned are very complex.