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The article reports on an empirical study of the faciltative effect of explicit instruction about language structure on the acquisition of second language (L2) morphosyntax, by means of an experiment in which students learning Spanish were given varying amounts of explanation about the grammatical structure. Students took a computer-assisted self-study course under explanation or non-explanation conditions, and were tested on the acquisition of a simple and a complex morphological structure and a simple and a complex syntactic structure. It is argued that explicit knowledge about language does not convert into implicit knowledge of language. The study is based on an attention focusing position, according to which implicit knowledge is acquired as a result of noticing specific forms and their meanings in the target language; noticing can be facilitated by explicit knowledge built up as a result of explicit instruction.