I have been invited, in this discussion piece, to offer my view on the opportunities and challenges that arise, for L2 education, from empirical studies on L2 acquisition. In this chapter, I therefore lay out what I see as central conditions for L2 education to move toward a more systematic concern with L2 learners' abilities to participate in social interactions, specifically stressing the need for clarifying epistemological and conceptual differences in the way language learning is understood by different stakeholders in the field. [For the complete volume, "Classroom-Based Conversation Analytic Research: Theoretical and Applied Perspectives on Pedagogy. Educational Linguistics. Volume 46," see ED660574.]