SI in a Real Classroom: What I Tried, What Worked, and What I'm Still Figuring Out
If you've made it to Part 3, you've done the reading. You know why students can understand input without processing it, and you know what referential and affective activities look like in practice. Now I want to get into what this actually looks like when you try to use it in a real class, with real students, on a real Tuesday.
This post is less a research summary and more an honest debrief. Here's what I've tried, what I think worked, what I'd do differently, and one idea for how SI principles can help even if your department is tied to common assessments.
Your Students Are Listening. They're Just Not Processing.
I wanted to share a moment that truly changed how I design activities.
I was at the CI Summit in Savannah, sitting in one of Eric Herman's sessions, feeling pretty good about my comprehensible input game. My students understood what I said. They could follow a story, answer questions, and read a text. I was doing my best to provide compelling, comprehensible input. And then Eric said something that I haven’t stopped thinking about:
Students can comprehend input without actually processing it.
Understanding and processing are not the same thing.
I sat with that for a while. Because if it's true, and it is, then it means a student can walk out of my class having understood everything I said and still not have made the form-meaning connections that lead to acquisition. They heard me. They got the gist. They did not necessarily notice that the verb ending changed, or that the word order was doing grammatical work, or that the plural marker was even there.
This post is about why that happens, and what the research says we can do about it.
SLAyyying Research
Let me tell you about the first time I cited a researcher to a colleague.
I was fired up. I had just read something that completely reframed how I thought about language instruction, and I could not wait to share it. I walked up to a fellow teacher, dropped the researcher's name, explained the finding, and waited for the moment of shared revelation.
They nodded politely and changed the subject.
I did not handle this well. For a while, my solution was to cite more researchers, louder. This did not work either. Eventually, I had to reckon with something uncomfortable: the research wasn't the problem. My ability to make it relevant, accessible, and actionable was.
That realization is the reason SLAyyy exists, and the reason I'm writing this post before diving into anything else on this blog. Before we talk about Structured Input, or listening activities, or how to design a Comprehension-Based unit, I want to talk about how to use research at all.
Because the goal was never to know more than your colleagues. It was to teach better than you did yesterday.