When students are tasked with production of a foreign sentence, they have to retrieve phonological, morphological, syntactical, and lexical elements stored in their memory and control their production on all these levels simultaneously and with the speed of speech output. When this task is assigned to beginning students, they are actually asked to retrieve something they have not yet stored in their memory and for which no processing strategies have been developed. Another consequence of premature oral practice, closely related to the problem of interference, is the problem of short-term memory overload. Speech is too rapid and the sentences are too long and/or complex to permit the STM to sort out the basic recurring elements. Children learning a first language are spoken to in short phrases; in many instances, one-word expressions (Broen, 1972). Short meaningful units apparently must be presented and learned so they may later be chunked into larger and larger meaningful units. Excessive exposure to a second language without meaningfulness may even be detrimental to learning the language. If the listening materials