You say your character is walking in place. So that means your leg controls are going forward and then back right? To translate forward through space it means that your controls need to continue moving forward. To demonstrate this just walk forward versus walk in place like on a treadmill.
To clarify, by "controls" he's referring to the character rig's foot placement / IK goal nulls for L and R foot. Walking in place, they'll just slide back and forth over the same region, but when moving forward/backwards, those nulls/goals need to actually move forward/backward along the ground.
When you created the walk cycle poses, you did so for the legs by moving the various target nulls/IK goals to control the legs (the legs are IK-driven, correct?)? Those are the things which need to continue moving along the path forward, instead of just sliding back and forth over the same area.
When you're doing a moving character, you use the IK-driven leg targets to control the movement, while posing the FK-driven arms to go along with the movement, if that makes sense. You shouldn't be "posing" the legs by moving their bones, etc. if the rig provides IK-driven goals for the legs/feet, that's the IK's job.
Without seeing the actual rig in question, it's really difficult to help in this. Can you upload a scene demonstrating the issue (incl. rig)? If you're not allowed to upload the character mesh but can upload just the rig, that's probably enough. If you cannot upload the rig either, then it's going to be difficult for us to help other than to provide some tutorial references on doing LW walk cycles.