This paper reports on a 2-year research study at the University of Southampton (England) regarding teachers' and students' beliefs, understandings, and classroom practices with respect to explicit language awareness in three secondary schools. Specifically, the study sought to document the understandings of secondary English and foreign language teachers on the nature of language, beliefs about the role of explicit language awareness in language education, and the way this was realized in their own classroom practices; the beliefs of their 13- and 14-year-old students were also solicited. Data was gathered for the teachers through observation and interviews and through group discussion and problem-solving tasks for the students; both groups were also given selected, individual interviews. Results revealed that most teachers seemed to have made a strategic commitment to building up, over time, a reference model of selected aspects of the target language system. There was less evidence that the pupils were making a conscious use of such models; they were drawing on already-internalized knowledge and employing strategies of a holistic, rather than analytic, nature. Overall findings suggest an association between consciousness-raising activity in these classrooms and the language development of some of the pupils surveyed. (Contains 14 references.) (Author/NAV)