Language learning vs language acquisition

    From my personal teaching experience: when we explain some grammar structures in the primary school, students seem understanding them qiute well. But then, on the very next lesson, they can hardly remember a thing. The other situation is with lexical material, especially if it is connected with something interesting(intonation, mime, pictures -all are very important). But the sixth-formers are able to understand and also remember and apply new grammar structures, even if they were learnt a couple of weeks ago. So, language acquisition is more likely to be used while teaching the youngsters, whereas the language learning seem to be more effective in senior classes.