This article argues that Firth and Wagner's 1997 contribution gained influence in second/foreign language teaching partly owing to a loose group of conceptual and ideological preconditions that drew on classroom methodologies, debates over educating second language teachers, and new views of how teachers could document and analyze their own practices. The article is organized around four issues drawn from Firth and Wagner: focus (How was classroom language teaching refocused by their critique?); meaning (What is the nature of meaning as the central driver in instructed learning?); locus (Given the preceding questions, how then does the locus of activity in the language classroom shift?); and identities (How are the notions of learner and teacher identities reshaped by this critique?). The discussion draws connections between the thinking articulated by Firth and Wagner and the practices of classroom language teaching, and includes suppositions that are susceptible to further investigation.