Recently, we appear to be witnessing a resurgence of the well-documented Lexical Approach (Lewis, 1997, 1993) and the primacy of meaning over form in the Second Language Acquisition research literature as well as pedagogical practice, since growing attention is currently being devoted in to revising the role of vocabulary learning and the communicative power of words, formulaic sequences, or lexical chunks in foreign language learning contexts (e.g. Dellar and Walkley, 2016; Deconinck, Boers and Eyckmans, 2010). As foreign language teachers at beginning university level, and especially in view of the recent renewed focus on the development of competences as promoted by the EHEA in our curriculum design in Spain, it seems that we need to reflect on whether we need to readdress the previous dominance of grammatical analysis and learning tasks focusing on structural manipulation in favour of the promotion of lexical acquisition activities as a more communicatively useful teaching objective. Instead, it would seem more profitable to explore the nature of language itself on a metacognitive level and promote ‘noticing’ of how language works in real-life contexts as a means to enable more successful acquisition and language production or comprehension.