In Pountain (2017), I argued that the indispensable foundation of an academic discipline of Modern Foreign Languages (MFL) must consist of (a) acquisition of and competence in the standard form of a foreign language, (b) awareness of its linguistic structure and varieties, and (c) critical study of cultural manifestations which depend on that language (loosely, the 'Three Ls': Language, Linguistics and Literature), justifying this view on the grounds that attention to such matters is what makes MFL distinctive from other humanities disciplines and what provides students of this discipline with distinctive valuable transferable skills. In the present article, I look more closely at the role of linguistic analysis in language learning and in the appreciation of written and spoken culture, in particular at how students can be encouraged to engage with the language they encounter in the world around them.