Understanding the place of consciousness in second language acquisition (SLA) is crucial for an understanding of how acquisition occurs. Considerable work has been done on this topic, but nearly all of it assumes a highly non-modular view, according to which language and its development is "nothing special". As this assumption runs counter to much of the thinking in SLA, there is a need for an account of the place of consciousness within a framework that assumes that core aspects of language compose a distinct module (or modules) of the mind: that language is something special. This article offers such an account within the reasonably well-established MOGUL framework, with its approach to consciousness and the place of consciousness in the cognitive system. After briefly reviewing existing work and then the topics of modularity and consciousness, it presents MOGUL and its treatment of consciousness and then considers the way that this account applies to (1) the initial establishment of linguistic representations in perception, (2) the way these representations are then consolidated, (3) restructuring of the system of representations, and (4) the development of linguistic knowledge outside the language module, i.e. conceptual linguistic knowledge.