Castilian speakers learning English have a tendency to overuse the expression all the in noun phrases (NPs) in cases where every or all is required.The purpose of this paper is to suggest a strategy for teaching these expressions, within the constext of an English grammar course or a grammar unit in a higher level language course, so as to help students learn to avoid such errors.This strategy involves first clarifying the fine-grained semantics of universal expressions within English and (independently) within Castilian, and then subsequently contrasting the two systems. The approach advocated here will thus underscore, at general level, (1) the limitations of teaching these expressions in terms of simple translation equivalences, and (2) the critical contributions that can be made to language pedagogy by results in theoretical linguistic research (in this case, on NP semantics and pragmatics).