| Summary: | The author revisits the conceptualization exercises which he devised in the early 1970s in the framework of the Audio-Visual-Global-Structural (SGAV) methodology. He first recalls the didactic context in reaction to which he introduced them, namely the pattern-drills then based on anti-cognitive premises. Conversely, those exercises described as conceptualization-aimed rely on the ability of some of the learners to reflect on the meaning and grammatical acceptability of the sentences which they are able to produce at a particular stage of their learning process. The exercises in question are built on presuppositions of a constructivist order, which are not accepted by a number of teachers and may consequently end up being turned into mere exercises of inductive grammar. It follows that, in order to use them in the hic et nunc of their classrooms, the teachers must be able to relativise their grammatical knowledge, and to accept that their students may not reason like them, when confronted to the grammar of the L2, at stake as they may draw on a stock of basic grammatical notions previously acquired while learning their own L1 or an earlier L2 and are therefore able to construct their personal grammatical representations of their own successes and failures while coping with a still largely foreign language.
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