A few years ago, while teaching Spanish 4, I worked through the Música Originaria unit from Huellas — Carrie Toth’s curriculum from Somewhere to Share, sold through The Comprehensible Classroom. If you don’t know Huellas, go find it. One of the things I loved about the unit was how many simple ideas it gave me for working with video and listening in class.

And I mean simple.

These weren’t elaborate listening stations. Nothing that took an hour to prep. Most of them were just: take the content of a video, give students a very specific reason to listen.

That distinction has stuck with me. And I owe it to that unit.

“Listen to this video” isn’t much of a task.

Listen to figure out which statement is true is.

Looking back at these activities now, I realize they were pushing me toward something else too — something I’ve become a lot more intentional about since. Listening tasks can do more than check comprehension. They can create repeated chances for learners to process a meaningful form–meaning connection without turning the lesson into a grammar exercise.

That’s the twist I’d add today. The four activities below are straight from that Huellas unit — the credit is Carrie’s, the twist at the end is mine.

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1. Pre-Listening with Whiteboards

Who doesn’t love a whiteboard?

I’d always used them with beginners, especially when introducing new language. Say or show something in Spanish, students demonstrate what they understood, I immediately see where comprehension is breaking down.

I’d mostly stopped doing that with my upper-level classes. No good reason. It’s simple, it works, and somewhere along the way I decided advanced students didn’t need it anymore. They did.

For this activity, I pulled several important phrases from the upcoming video and worked through them one at a time before students watched. Students wrote what they thought each phrase meant on their whiteboards in English, showed me their answers, got feedback immediately.

The important part wasn’t really the whiteboard.

It was the selection of the language.

I wanted phrases that carried important meaning in the video. Not random vocabulary that happened to show up in it.

Working one phrase at a time also let us stay with the language longer. Instead of:

They understood it. Great. Next.

I could ask another question, change one piece of information, connect it to something students already knew, reuse the phrase somewhere else.

Useful reminder: upper-level students still need repeated, comprehensible exposure. They just need more interesting language to process it with.

2. 7 of 10

This one is ridiculously easy.

Write ten statements about the listening in English — or whatever language you and your students share. Only seven actually happen. Students listen and identify which seven.

That’s it.

But the design does real work. Students aren’t trying to understand every word. They’re listening for meaning and testing it against possible interpretations. Make the wrong statements almost right — the tradition began in the north, not the south — and now students have a reason to listen closely instead of waiting to hear a word they recognize.

For quick finishers, I added one more layer: What did you hear that supports your answer? A word, a phrase, whatever helped them decide. Same task for everyone, one more rung for the kids who needed it.

3. Which Do You Hear?

Same principle, narrower lens. Instead of ten statements, one detail at a time, two possible readings:

A. The musicians perform only during religious festivals.
B. The musicians perform during religious festivals and community celebrations.

Students pick which one they actually heard.

The trick is making both options plausible. One ridiculous answer and students don’t have to process anything. Two options that differ by one meaningful detail, and suddenly there’s a reason to listen carefully.

This is where I now see the clearer link to Structured Input. It’s not:

Did you hear this word?

It’s:

Which meaning did the language communicate?

That difference matters.

4. The Splits

This one moves a little closer to the language itself.

Take several sentences from the video, split them in half. Beginnings:

1. La música tradicional se desarrolló…

2. Los músicos utilizan…

3. La celebración representa…

Endings, shuffled:

A. instrumentos hechos a mano.
B. una conexión importante con la comunidad.
C. durante varios siglos.

Students match halves as they listen.

I do this after students already understand the video generally. Otherwise it turns into a sound-matching game — I heard música, there’s música on the paper! — and that’s not the point.

Once they’ve got the general message, The Splits gets them to notice how that meaning actually gets expressed. Meaning first. Form second. Not because form doesn’t matter, but because form is only useful once learners have something meaningful to hang it on.

What I’d Add Now: Let the Authentic Text Carry the Form

I did a lesson recently with Juanes’s A Dios le pido that pushed this further. The song is basically built for it.

Over and over, Juanes uses the same frame: pedir + que + a desired action or state. The frame holds still, the meaning moves — family, love, life, time, eventually his country.

We didn’t start with the grammar. We started with what he asked of others. First listen: Who is he talking to? What does he want? Then students read the lyrics and sorted what he asked into categories of their own choosing. Family. Love. Life. Country. Whatever made sense to them.

That sorting task was the whole lesson. They were rereading the same grammatical frame again and again, but the task was about meaning, every time.

Only after they’d spent real time interpreting what Juanes asked of others did I project an enhanced version of the text and ask: What keeps repeating?

At that point they couldn’t not see it. And the explanation took one sentence: This is how we talk about what we want someone, or something, else to do for us.

No paradigm. No verb chart. No twenty-minute subjunctive lecture. The text had already done the work.

The Twist

That lesson clarified something for me: I don’t need to change the activities. I need to change what I’m looking for when I design them.

Not just how do I help students understand this video, also is there a useful form–meaning connection already sitting inside this text?

If there is, I can sequence the listening so students hit it again and again while doing actual interpretive work: understand the message, make a meaning-based distinction, go back to find what carried that meaning, notice the form that keeps showing up, then reuse it themselves.

That last step doesn’t need to be elaborate. In the Juanes lesson, students used a fixed frame and a word bank to write a few things they ask of others: Yo le pido a ___ que ___. The production came after a flood of input, supported enough that students could think about meaning instead of scrambling for a conjugation.

Repeated Listening Needs a New Job

This is still the biggest thing I take from all of this.

Repeated listening works better when each listen has a different job. First listen: What is this mostly about? Next: Which of these ideas did the speaker actually mention? Then: Which detail is correct? Then: How would you organize the speaker’s ideas? Finally: What language keeps appearing when the speaker expresses that meaning?

The audio hasn’t changed. The reason for listening has.

That’s the difference between “we’re listening again because you didn’t get it” and “we’re listening again because there’s something new to figure out.”

And sometimes, if you pick the text carefully, students end up processing the same grammatical relationship a dozen times before anyone ever says the word grammar.

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Gaslight

It’ll All Work Out in the End! …Right?

How Much Should We Emphasize Any Given Aspect of a Language?

The Need for Massive Aural Input

How to Reread Texts Many Times

Gatekeep - Paige, D. D. (2011). 16 Minutes of “Eyes-on-Text” Can Make a Difference: Whole-Class Choral Reading as an Adolescent Fluency Strategy. Reading Horizons: A Journal of Literacy and Language Arts, 51 (1).

Repeated Readings Help!

More Efficient Than…

Student and Teacher Perceptions

Girlboss

Control the Game

Interruption

Table Tennis Reading

Embedded Readings, Revisited

Write and Discuss

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Book Study: Learner Feedback for Language Growth by Nickel, Strauss, and Budke

TPRS with Chinese Characteristics by Terry Waltz

Hellooooooo!

Tonight we are excited to start our chat series on the book Learner Feedback for Language Growth.

Stacy has crafted some great questions to get us started. Preview the questions below, and join us tonight at 8 P.M. Eastern at https://slayyypod.com/chat

1. Pretest! Are you a novice, intermediate, or advanced in the skill of giving learner feedback? Justify your choice.

2. What does “Performance Domain Indicators” mean to you? What questions do you have about them?

3. How would you describe performance and proficiency to your learners?

4. In your opinion, what are some pros and cons of the Performance Domain Indicators?

5. Do your colleagues evaluate learner work like you do? How do you stay on the same page? Or, how do you deal with disagreements?
   

We’re looking forward to great discussions over the course of this book study :)

Bill, Ben, Stacy

Gaslight

“Ok, Just Be a Leader Now!”

Failing to Identify Strengths

Lack of Definitions and Models

Walking the Line Between Guidance and Control

Gatekeep - Nathan Campbell, 2026 ACTFL National Language Teacher of the Year

Progressive Leadership System

Building Experience and Perspective

Modeling Qualities of a Strong Leader

Girlboss

When to Guide, When to Let Go

Clear Expectations

The Secret of the Shared Drive

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Book Study: Learner Feedback for Language Growth by Nickel, Strauss, and Budke

Ben’s German Club Ideas List

This post was originally shared on my old personal site, but Ben told me that someone shouted this post out recently at a conference so I figured I needed to get it posted over here. This was an assignment that I had to do for a course and we were all invited to share our work with the world, so here it is! I hope it’s helpful :)

I used to think teaching with comprehensible input (CI) was inherently equitable. I’d argue, “it’s the only thing we KNOW students need to acquire language”. I still think that’s true. And while CI is still the first thing I consider when planning for student language acquisition, I have reflected and learned a lot about what it means to be equitable in a world language classroom. In this post, I want to share some thoughts around equitable teaching practices in the world language classroom and how Universal Design for Learning (CAST, n.d.) could help us ensure that we give all our students what they need to be successful language learners.

As I work towards making myself more conscious of whether I am enacting equitable teaching practices, I want to keep in mind my goals for my students. If I don’t know my goals for my students, I can’t make sure that everyone has an equitable chance of achieving those goals. So, what are my goals for my students? I want them to be more confident communicators at increasingly higher proficiency. I want them to learn about themselves and the world. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, I want them to show respect and empathy for the people and cultures they perceive as different.

What is Universal Design for Learning?
Universal design for learning (UDL) is a framework that aims to make education accessible to the most students possible, with the idea that if we teach to the students who need the most support, everyone will benefit. There are three principles of UDL: Engagement, Representation, and Action and Expression (CAST, n.d.).

Engagement (the ‘why’ of learning)
When planning for learning, we need to consider “why” most students need to learn our content, and whether the content is engaging enough for most students. Another way to think about this principle is: Is this content relevant to the needs of my students?

Suppose I can first find a topic that is interesting to students. In that case, I can make the language of that topic comprehensible to the students in my classroom and lower the affective filter, leading to opportunities for students to engage with content that is relevant to their interest, increasing the likelihood of acquisition of language related to the topic of interest (Venditti, 2021). Lowering the affective filter? I think that’s good for everyone in the room. Although teaching with CI can do this, it is essential to remember to review the topic and any resources we use thoroughly to check for bias, misrepresentation, or stereotypes of target language speaking communities, because comprehensible language that promotes bias does not stop promoting bias because it is comprehensible.

Representation (the ‘what’ of learning)
When planning for learning, we represent the content (words, phrases, structures, or culture) in multiple ways. I have heard from Michele Kindt (personal communication, 2020–2023) that we need to offer robust exposure to content. Here, robust exposure means that rote repetition of vocabulary or structures is not enough. Students need to hear, read, and see language represented in multiple contexts to build a stronger mental representation of the target language. There are so many CI teaching strategies to introduce and offer robust exposure to language: ClipChat, TPRS, Personalized Questions and Answers (PQA), TPR, and more. A toolkit of comprehension-based activities can ensure that we represent our content in varied and meaningful ways, supporting UDL’s principle of representation.

We also need to ensure that students have robust exposure to cultural topics. I reiterate the need to assess materials that we use in class for potential bias, as curricular materials can “present sanitized versions of language and culture” (Baggett, 2020, p. 45) that do not show the breadth and beauty of the cultures we share with our students.

Action and Expression (the ‘how’ of learning)
In UDL, action and expression refer to how students express their growth (Alghamdy, 2023). This can be during formative or summative assessments, and it is essential to provide student choice in demonstrating what they can do with the new language and content they have learned. At CI conferences that offer coaching (see Neubauer & Wesely, 2023), coaches are encouraged to highlight how teachers accept student answers. Acceptable answers can be single words, nodding yes or no, whole sentences, and sometimes even responses in the first language. Permitting students to answer in a way that is comfortable to them and demonstrating that we value any language growth supports the final principle of UDL.

Implementing UDL
Now that we have an idea of how UDL fits into a comprehension-based class, I want to share some strategies that I believe we can take with us into the beginning of this school year:

1. Lead with input

   • Ensure that students are getting the necessary ingredient for language acquisition. Use language that you’re confident most students will understand.

2. Work in collaboration with students to find relevant topics that will engage them in meaningful personal and linguistic growth

   • Consider using a beginning-of-the-year survey to gauge interest in different topics and look for common themes of what students say is relevant to their lives and how they want to use language.

3. Conduct an audit on your curricular materials to ensure no bias, stereotypes, or misrepresentation.

   • Check out Learning for Justice’s Hidden Bias reflection tool to begin your reflection.

4. Vary your activities and content

   • Students need robust exposure not only to language but also to cultures and perspectives. Use a variety of activities to recycle vocabulary, and incorporate multiple perspectives.

5. Accept and demonstrate appreciation when students give responses

   • Language learners will develop at their own pace. Honor what students CAN do so that we know when we can ask more of them.

To close, I want to look at my goals for students and reflect on how UDL can help me achieve them, and hopefully help your students achieve their goals. First, I want my students to be confident communicators. By offering robust exposure, language students will develop a mental representation of language, and by enacting the UDL principle of Action and Expression, I hope to empower students to use the language that they have to participate in class communication in a way that is comfortable for them whether the response is a non-verbal cue or paragraph length discourse. Second, I want students to learn about themselves and their peers. The UDL principle of Engagement guides us in choosing relevant and engaging content. I can find out what topics interest students and select a topic that will resonate with as many students as possible. From there, however, my responsibility as the teacher is to ensure that I share multiple and respectful perspectives from other cultures through auditing my materials. This leads to my final goal: I want students to respect and have empathy for cultures that are not their own. When we aim to make our language teaching universally accessible to our students, I believe we can meet all of these goals.

Note: Right after I wrote this, I saw NNELL’s Journal Learning Languages published an article on this exact same topic! Check it out! https://nnell.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/NNELL-Journal-2025_Final-with-Klett-Ad.pdf

References

Alghamdy, R. Z. (2023). The effect of universal design for learning on the proficiency of English as a foreign language students’ acquisition of reading and vocabulary skills. Arab World English Journal, 14(2), 146–160. https://doi.org/10.24093/awej/vol14no2.11

Baggett, H. C. (2020). Relevance, Representation, and Responsibility: Exploring World Language Teachers’ Critical Consciousness and Pedagogies. L2 Journal, 12(2). https://doi.org/10.5070/l212246037

CAST. (n.d.). Universal design for learning. CAST. https://www.cast.org/what-we-do/universal-design-for-learning/

Neubauer, D., & Wesely, P. (2023). K-12 world language teachers’ use of conferences as professional development. Teaching and Teacher Education, 124, 104042. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tate.2023.104042

Venditti, E. (2021). Using comprehensible input in the Latin classroom to enhance language proficiency. The Journal of Classics Teaching, 22, 22–28. https://doi.org/10.1017/S2058631021000039

Are Students Made to Attend to Meaning?

Treating Language Like Other Subjects

Gatekeep - Gonzalez Bueno, Manuela. “S-PACE for Teaching L2 Grammar: Adding Structure to the PACE Model.” Applied Language Learning, vol. 31, no. 1 & 2, 2021, pp. 29–49.

Girlboss

Use Low Cognitive Load Sentences to Focus Attention

Using Student-Friendly Grammar Language

References

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Book Study: Learner Feedback for Language Growth by Nickel, Strauss, and Budke

Bethanie Drew’s Blog

Lightbown: 10 Generalizations

Gaslight

Is AI for Students or for Teachers?

The Humanity in Teaching

You Can’t AI Your Way to Communicative Competence

Gatekeep - Çelik, Ö. (2025). Evolution of foreign language education in the age of AI. ELT Research Journal, 14(1), 61-77.

Teachers as Filters of Knowledge and Designers of Learning Processes

Ben Rants, Extensively

Girlboss

How to Make the Classroom a Safe, Inclusive Learning Environment

Productivity Hacking - with the Teacher’s Competence

References

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Book Study: Learner Feedback for Language Growth by Nickel, Strauss, and Budke

The SLAyyy Field Guide is LIVE!

What started as a class project to make a dictionary of key terms has taken off.

The SLAyyy Field Guide began as a place to gather the ideas and language that help us talk about language teaching and learning as part of a class project. The class I made the dictionary for was “Advocacy for Second Language Learning”. It is now growing into a knowledge hub with podcast episodes, key terms, tools, activities, and sources—all in one place.

My hope is that it becomes useful when you are lesson planning, writing curriculum, creating activities, or simply trying to make sense of an idea you keep hearing about. The goal is not to hand teachers a script. It is to make research and classroom-facing ideas easier to find, revisit, question, and use in ways that fit the learners in front of you.

You can explore the Field Guide here:

fieldguide.slayyypod.com

It will keep growing, and I hope you find something useful there as you continue to SLAyyy.

Bill

Back in the Twitter days before it was called X there was a great community of language teachers that would get together nearly every Thursday night and just chat with one another about different concepts and language teacher. And through that I made so many lifelong friends and learned so much and was able to share some of what has worked in my classroom.

However, online checks like #Langchat Are not as common as they used to be.

Here at sleigh, we don’t want to just talking at you but we also want to talk with you so next Monday, July 27 at 8 PM Eastern we will be doing our first live text chat to talk about the upcoming school.

I know that I will be doing my best to reach out to all my old Lang chat friends and I hope you bring along yourself and someone else who could take some time with fellow teachers to just talk about the new year

In the meantime, you can go ahead and introduce yourself below!

Join the chat

-bill

Using metalinguistic terminology when giving students feedback might be the surest way to gatekeep student communication.

“You used the wrong subjunctive trigger.” “You used the imperfect you should have used the preterite.”

These ARE pieces of feedback that one could give their student, but does this feedback actually do anything for students? Or when they hear the feedback do they get lost in the metalinguistic jargon because now not only do they have to try to understand and produce their L2, they have to try to reconcile their ability to communicate with their ability to recognize the names, uses, and forms of metalinguistic items. Functionally naming the language we use in class aims to inform students of what they are trying to say rather than how they said it wrong. Instead of “Use the preterite here instead of imperfect,” I might say “You used the form that describes background conditions/actions, you want to use the form that shows that an action happened once.” It’s the same feedback, but a different perspective. It shifts the vibe from “you did something wrong” to “you communicated something, let’s work to make it more clear.”

Every language form is used for SOMETHING: hypothesizing, describing, comparing and contrasting, narrating. The list goes on. So naming language forms functionally starts with considering what is the actual purpose of communication? Another way to think about it: If my student doesn’t know the term “subjunctive” how can I explain its use for our present context to make it make sense. For something like the subjunctive, I may call it “the form of desire,” “the form of recommendation,” “the form of uncertainty,” or something similar; depending on the communicative goal for the class/unit.

Dynamic Assessment treats formative assessment, summative assessment, and instruction as intrinsically linked: every instructional move doubles as a assessment, and every assessmen

t doubles as a teaching moment. The mechanism behind that link is mediation: the teacher intervenes in the learner’s process, not just at the end of it, and the intervention itself reveals what the learner can do with support, not just what they can already do alone. That’s the whole point of working in the ZPD — you’re not measuring a fixed score, you’re testing how much scaffolding closes the gap, in real time, mid-task.

Mediation only works if it lands in language the learner can act on immediately. That’s where functional naming stops being a nicety and becomes load-bearing. If the mediating move requires the student to first decode a grammar term before they can even locate what you’re talking about, the mediation has already failed — you’ve inserted a vocabulary lesson into a moment that was supposed to be a communicative one. Functional naming keeps the feedback in the same register as the task itself, so the student can take the mediation and immediately try again, which is the entire mechanism Micro-Feedback depends on.

Mediation itself comes in two grains. You can mediate the same communicative function across the whole class — everyone gets fed the same frame, the same job, and feedback tracks how each student executes that one function. Or you can individualize: different students get different mediation depending on what they specifically need in that moment. Neither is more correct; they’re just different tools for different goals, and which one you reach for says something about whether you’re checking a function class-wide or meeting individual gaps.

In my classroom, mini-feedback happens two ways. One is form-focused mini-stories, where students label the language themselves with functional naming — that’s a blog post in its own right, with its own mechanics worth unpacking separately. The other is sentence stems, which is where I want to stay for now.

On Fridays we watch Tierra Incógnita. I want the viewing to mostly be about enjoying a Spanish TV show, but students need a task to anchor their attention, so I bring out whiteboards and sentence stems — this is the uniform-function version of mediation: everyone’s tracking the same job, just with their own content.

One example: as we watched an episode, I had each student pick a character to follow. On the board: “X quiere que Y…” One sentence. Students’ first job is just to notice — which character wants something from someone else? They’ve got the frame; they just need to find a moment that fits it.

As I walk around the room checking whiteboards, I’m only giving feedback on the subjunctive word in the second half of the sentence. So when a student writes “Eric quiere que sus padres aparecen,” I tell them: Great job! To make it clearer, we’re going to use aparezcan — because that’s the hope form. Eric doesn’t know if his parents will return. We use the hope form when we want someone else to do something, but we don’t know if they’ll do it.

That one fixed location, the subjunctive verb, every time, is what makes the whole loop work. I know exactly where to look on every whiteboard, which means I can celebrate what a student’s already doing independently, gauge how much support they need to close the gap, and move to the next student without losing the thread of either the show or the feedback.

This is what not gatekeeping actually looks like, down at the level of a single verb, mid-task, on a Friday afternoon. "Use aparezcan, that's the hope form" takes the same half-second as "use the present subjunctive”, it's not slower, it's not softer, it's not letting anything slide. It's just feedback that a kid can act on without first passing a vocabulary quiz to understand what I said.

Gaslight

Keeping Up with Grading

Planning Ahead

Class Size!

Don’t Rush

Gatekeep

TPR, Circumlocution, and Synonym Stacking

Brain Breaks - Heads or Tails?

Girlboss

Classroom Management

Having Just a Lil’ Structure

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Next Semester’s Book Study: Learner Feedback for Language Growth by Nickel, Strauss, and Budke

Bill’s Classroom Survivor Template

Get the Resources on TPT

This ready-to-use bundle pairs three adapted authentic texts on the 1901 Dance of the 41 — a foundational event in Mexican LGBTQ+ history — with a structured grammar workbook focused on si hubiera... habría (past counterfactual conditionals). Students read, discuss, and write about one of the most fascinating and underteached stories in Spanish-language history.

What’s included (6 components, 35+ pages):

• Grammar reference page introducing la segunda oportunidad (si hubiera... habría) with functional labels, word banks, and content-specific examples

• Lectura compartida — factual narrative anchor (adapted from Agencia Presentes)

• Texto Adaptado A — 1901 broadside analysis (adapted from Los 41 Maricones)

• Texto Adaptado B — modern historical reframing (adapted from Carlos Monsiváis, Letras Libres)

• Cuaderno de gramática — 15 paired Paso 1/Paso 2 activities across all three texts

• Escritura colaborativa — jigsaw writing prompt + IDEAS paragraph planning sheet

• Teacher guide with suggested 4-day sequence, content notes, and differentiation options

How it works: Students read the shared text together, then split into jigsaw pairs — one partner reads the 1901 press response, the other reads the Monsiváis historical analysis. The knowledge gap is real: each partner has genuinely different information. The workbook activities build from structured input (Paso 1) to communicative output (Paso 2) before partners collaborate on a counterfactual paragraph using the IDEAS framework.

On the grammar approach: The goal isn’t mastery of a complex form — it’s meaningful exposure and targeted microfeedback opportunities. The structure appears in context before it’s ever named.

On the content: This bundle includes a teacher content note on the historical use of a slur in the title of the 1901 source. The word does not appear in any adapted student text. The material is handled with care and historical seriousness throughout.

Best for: Spanish 3, Spanish 4, AP Spanish Language, heritage speaker courses

Not a good fit for: Novice or early intermediate students (Spanish 1–2)

SLAyyy makes research-informed Spanish curriculum for teachers who care about both language acquisition and the stories they put in front of students.

Every few months, the advice pops up again: “Don’t adapt the text. Adapt the task.”

I understand exactly where it comes from. For years, language teachers were handed textbook dialogues that no person would ever actually read. The authentic resources movement was a necessary reaction to that. We want students interacting with real language, real culture, and real ideas.

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But a few years ago, I started noticing a disconnect in my own room. I was taking the advice to heart: handing students an authentic resource and heavily scaffolding the task I asked them to do with it. But it wasn’t working the way I hoped.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the phrase adapt the task, not the text. I don’t think it is wrong, but I am wondering if it’s slightly out of order. Task adaptation assumes the text already sits somewhere within the learner’s reach. You can simplify what you ask students to do endlessly, but if the text itself is miles past where they can construct meaning, the task can still be overwhelming.

So, lately, I’ve been experimenting with a different sequence: adapting the text first, and then adapting the task.

Observing the Gap

Picture handing a novice learner a newspaper article. We might tell them, “You don’t need to understand every word,” and then ask for a simple summary.

When I did this, I realized the message my students actually internalized was often the exact opposite. Many walked away convinced they were just bad at the language, when the truth was much simpler: I had asked them to engage with something past their current proficiency. Novices recognize words and phrases. Intermediates start connecting ideas. Advanced learners interpret and analyze. When I was handing all three the same text, it made sense that the results were wildly different.

Building the Bridge

I don’t modify texts because I dislike authentic resources. I do it because I’ve realized how gradual the learning process really is for my students.

Now, when I find an article, infographic, or video I want my class to engage with, I start by asking: What language will they need in order to interact with this resource later?

Then, I try to build a bridge toward it. Sometimes an infographic becomes a dialogue. Sometimes an article becomes a simplified reading. Sometimes a video becomes a shared reading. The goal is never to replace the authentic resource, but rather to prepare them for it.

Flooding the Form

When we talk about adaptation, it’s easy to picture just swapping hard words for easy ones. But I’m finding that is just a small piece of the puzzle.

The real work seems to be identifying the language students will need when they reach the authentic resource, and then flooding them with it. And I mean a specific kind of flooding: not just topical vocabulary, but the form.

If my students will eventually need to recommend solutions to a social problem, I try to saturate the texts they read with the structure that makes recommendations. We see it across a shared reading, individual readings, and activities until that form is familiar long before anyone officially names it. If they’ll eventually weigh competing perspectives, I flood the input with the language of opinion and support.

The point isn’t necessarily that the words get easier. It’s that the form they’ll need shows up so often, in so many contexts, that it stops feeling abstract.

The Case for a Complete Glossary

When my students read adapted texts, I give them a complete glossary for the text. The glossary is not a vocabulary list for students to memorize. Its a reference sheet for them so they can read with a little more fluency.

I do this because I’ve seen how quickly a single unknown word can stop the reading cold, and I really just want them to read. When a student hits an unknown word, I don’t want them freezing every ten seconds to look it up, or quietly giving up three paragraphs in. I want them constructing meaning.

For my classroom, the glossary removes the obstacle so comprehension can actually happen. Support seems to be how learners get enough successful reading experiences to keep reading.

Fading the Support

Eventually, the authentic text comes back. I take away the text supports: he flooding, the glosses, the smoothed sentences. Students meet the real thing on its own terms.

But notice what stays: the task support. This is where adapt the task, not the text finally comes into play for me, at the end. The authentic resource stays exactly as its author wrote it, and I scaffold what I ask students to do with it.

It helps me to think of text support and task support as two separate dials. Across a unit, I slowly turn the text dial from full down to zero, but the task dial stays engaged the whole way.

By the time we get to the unadapted text, students aren’t meeting the topic cold. They’ve already encountered the key ideas, processed the language, and built the background knowledge. The authentic resource becomes evidence of learning, and they get to discover that they understand far more than they could have a few weeks earlier.

In Spanish 4, maybe I give them an AP reading style test and allow them to use the authentic resource. Or when students write at the end of a unit, they can use the authentic resources while they write.

A Progression, Not a Choice

I’m trying to move away from seeing this as a choice between adapted texts or authentic texts. In my room, it works better as a progression:

Modified authentic text → Supported reading → Authentic text and engagement

Running alongside it is the task, doing the heavy lifting at the end once the text supports are gone. The modified text is never the destination; it is just the bridge. And if that bridge carries students to authentic language with confidence instead of frustration, it is doing exactly what it needs to do.

Examples

Here is an authentic infographic from Roy Gallardo Monos, and an adapted text I made for level 1 students to read BEFORE showing them the infographic.

La Importancia De Agua

2.4MB ∙ PDF file

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Download

Here is an example from the Convivencia con Animales unit (Curently free on TPT) that will appear in a revision of the unit at some point.

Authentic article: https://dossierpolitico.com/2024/11/15/vaquita-marina-un-tesoro-mexicano-en-peligro/

La Convivencia Con Animales Texts

2.42MB ∙ PDF file

Download

Download

Novelty is exhausting. I’ve already got all of the lesson plans together, but we’ve done x activity recently so I can’t just do the same activity, that wouldn’t be novel!

So I scratch it. Start over. Design something new. Something the students haven’t seen before. Something that will engage them because it’s fresh. Because the brain craves novelty, right?

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Except now I’ve spent an extra hour designing an activity when I could’ve spent that hour on something that actually matters: making sure the input is solid, anticipating where comprehension breaks down, thinking about what individual students need. And my students show up to class not knowing what to expect. Not because the content is unpredictable, but because the shape of the class is. They don’t know what help looks like. They don’t know what’s coming next. And that uncertainty is not engagement. That’s noise.

I learned this from a teacher who kicked me out of a meeting. She had a set routine: certain activities on certain days. A predictable structure. And I dismissed it at the time because I was trapped in the novelty frame. She was boring me. How could boring be right?

Neuroscientists recently did fMRI research on how the brain actually responds to novelty and uncertainty (Cockburn et al., 2021). They found that novelty works as a shortcut: the brain inflates the expected reward of novel options and suppresses uncertainty checks in the process. It feels engaging. But that engagement doesn’t translate to learning.

That’s the trap I fell into. I was chasing a feeling, not an outcome. And while I was burning myself out reconstructing lessons for novelty, I was losing the one thing students actually needed: predictable structures they could rely on so that they can take control of their learning. Novelty should live inside those structures, not replace them. The teacher knew that. The science confirms it.

Are my slides ready? Did I print what I needed? Is the assignment created in Canvas? Did I get grading done? Who will be absent today? Do I have alternate work for them to “catch up”? Are those two students still mad at each other? Do I have an observation coming up? Did I write my objective on the board?

We, teachers, ask ourselves many questions at the start of each school day to ensure we are prepared to teach. When observations/evaluations come around, though, and I know that I've double- and triple-checked everything, there's typically one question I haven’t answered: “Did I write my objective on the board?”

Short answer: no.

I know what I want my students to be able to achieve. I know that I’ve crafted a learning experience to help them meet the objective. And with so little time for everything else we have to do, what’s the big deal about forgetting to write the objective?

Recently, though, I’ve been thinking: Is it enough that I know where we’re going if my students don’t?

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Gaslight: We don’t post objectives because it doesn’t work.

I have been told since I started teaching that writing learning objectives on the board was best practice. However, no one ever really explained why it was best practice. Teachers, with limited time, understandably brush off writing objectives because preparing and writing the objectives can take a lot of time. As people, I think we all fall victim to the desire for instant results. We were told that writing objectives is best practice, but the payoff doesn’t seem worth the effort. Sure, I might get a slightly higher mark on my evaluation if my objectives are posted, or if my students can tell my evaluator what we’re doing. But, if I’m only writing my objectives on the board to check off a box on an evaluation, I wasn’t writing objectives for the right reason anyway.

Furthermore, students are watching. If they see that I write objectives but don’t reference them, or if I only write them when an evaluation is happening, they’ll assume the stated objective doesn’t matter because I haven’t acted as if it mattered.

So I’ve been thinking: what if writing the objective on the board wasn’t the problem, but the way we were (not) taught how to use it was?

Gatekeep: Well-written objectives can support student self-regulation.

If you caught episode 37 of SLAyyy, you’ll know that the current course I’m taking started by discussing learning strategies for language learners. That episode laid a foundation for me in understanding what self-regulation means in the classroom, why it’s important, and how to help students develop skills to understand how they learn.

SLAyyy: Second Language Acquisition for Everyone!

Ep. 37: SLAyyy Teaching Learning-Strategies to Students

Artists…

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5 months ago · Bill Langley-Bostick

Self-regulation, in essence, is the ability to monitor your own progress toward a goal. It’s just a fancy way to describe what we teachers do every day: we have the goal to teach students, we check that materials are ready, and we know what “prepared to teach” looks like, and we know (sometimes) what to do when we aren’t as prepared as we could be.

Students need to be able to do that with learning. They need to be able to ask themselves at the end of class, “Did I do what I was supposed to do today?” However, to answer that question, students have to know what they’re supposed to be doing.

When we were told to write objectives on the board, we were probably told to use the SWBAT (Students Will Be Able To…) format. That is a GREAT phrase to use for internal teaching documents. But in my opinion, talking about students in the third person removes the individual’s role in learning. It sets a blanket expectation for the teacher to evaluate students against, rather than something the student can actually use to self-assess.

Girlboss: The fix is pretty simple; it takes a small but intentional shift in how we write objectives.

Take a traditional objective like: SWBAT describe the causes of the Spanish Civil War.

As a student, I read that, and I don’t know if we’ve met that objective. I can only speak to my own ability.

Now flip it: I can describe at least two causes of the Spanish Civil War.

That’s it. Shout-out to ACTFL-NCSSFL for their work on the Can-Do statements, which give us loads of examples of what student-facing objectives can look like (ACTFL-NCSSFL 2026 Can-Do).

Because the objective is written in the first person, students can actually use it. Additionally, the objective is specific enough that, at the end of class, the “I can…” statement becomes a true-or-false statement. Post it at the beginning of class so students know what to focus on during the lesson. At the end of class, take thirty seconds, point to the objective, and invite students to ask themselves: CAN I describe at least two causes of the Spanish Civil War? Did we have the opportunity to try this today? Did I do my part to support myself so I could do this?

Same reflective questions at the end of class, every day, until students start reflecting without prompting.

Some days you’ll forget to write objectives. That’s where unit-level objectives come in. Post the unit objectives on the wall and leave them for the duration of the unit. They won’t be as specific as the daily objective, but they give students something to orient themselves to on days when we haven’t self-regulated enough to post the objective.

Takeaway
Writing the objective on the board was never a bad idea. But we were never given the tools to do it in a way that actually helped students; instead, it was presented to us as “something to do” for evaluations. Moving from evaluative objectives to something students can use to reflect on their learning lies in teachers knowing where learners are going and how they will get them there. But if your students don’t know where you’re heading, they are along for the ride, constantly asking, “Are we there yet?” because we haven’t told them what the destination is or what the plan to get there is.

AP season makes the end of the spring semester at my school challenging, as I’m sure it does at many schools. Students are in and out of class to take AP exams, then when APs are over my school jumps straight into final exams. I have long believed that end of year assessments in language classes are intrinsically cumulative, so typically I have just made an exam based on whatever unit we end up on at the end of the year. However, I don’t want to leave any students out from any content that they might miss due to taking AP exams so last year I played around with a different kind of final unit that would be mostly self-guided.

A book report!

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Starting at the beginning of AP exams, students selected a book to read from the class library. I did curate my collection a little bit for this project. While students have access to any of my books throughout the year, I wanted to make sure that the books I made available had something the students could investigate more if they wanted. I then had them create a schedule for themselves: when would they be out of class for APs? How many class periods would the have to read? How much would they need to read each day to have time to work on their presentation?

Each class day then was made up of 3 parts: Structured Input review, independent reading, discussion/independent reflection.

I made the structured input review packet to review the grammar concepts I’m asked to cover in level 4. Students have seen these structures, used these structures, and can more or less recognize the structures in context. Now I am asking them to select the right form to get across the intended meaning. Check out the posts on Structured Input to learn more! An alternative if you’re not ready to dive into structured input, I had a lot of success using Independent Textivities from Comprehensible Classroom as a way to hold kids accountable for reading something during class.

The next part of class, independent reading, was exactly that. Though I did allow students to read books together, they had to complete the project independently. When students finished reading for the day, they moved to the independent reflection activity. Rather than summarizing what they read, students were trying to say something about the content by connecting what was happening in their book to themes we’d been discussing as a class, or drawing comparisons to other texts and experiences they’d had. The goal was to push past plot retelling and into the kind of interpretive thinking the assessment would eventually require.

The independent review activity asked students to say something about their book, more than just summarizing. We also saved time each day for class discussion where we discussed one of eight themes, the same themes would be used as a bank for the presentation Q&A and the writing prompt for the final assessment.

For the final assessment, students gave a presentation on their book. The format was completely open, and I really do mean COMPLETELY open. Talk about your book, make slides, bring a poster, record a video. The presentation itself was pass/fail: did you read the book? Can you talk about it? Do you sound prepared? But the real assessment happened in the Q&A that followed. I asked questions drawn from our eight themes, and what I was listening for was holistic, could they demonstrate comprehension of what they read, connect it to something bigger, and sustain an actual conversation about it in Spanish? A strong response wasn’t just accurate; it was alive.

The written piece worked the same way. On the day of the final, students received a cold prompt drawn from a shortened list of five themes. In class, timed, no scaffolding. Because we had discussed these themes every single day of the unit, the content wasn’t a surprise — only which theme they’d be writing about was. That’s the design: reduce the unknown, raise the bar on what they do with it.

Here’s page from the workbook, and the Final Exam Writing document with a rubric an planning sheet!

Check it out on TPT

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.

The Gaslight: “If You Know the Research, Implementation Is the Easy Part”

It is not.

Knowing that learners process utterance-initial (beginning of a sentence) forms more easily than utterance-medial (middle of the sentence) ones is genuinely useful. Knowing it does not automatically make you good at designing activities that account for it. There’s a gap between understanding a principle and building something that actually applies it, and I have definitely made activities that I thought were doing one thing and were doing something else entirely.

The Gatekeep: What I Actually Tried

My Spanish 4 students have a complicated relationship with ambiguity. They grew up with traditional assessments. They want something to study, something with the right answer, something they can feel in control of. For a while, I gave them content-based grades with no traditional tests, which I thought was reasonable and fair. And it was. But for many of them, the lack of explicit stakes meant a lack of attention.

So I started building unit content tests. Multiple choice, content-focused, something students could actually prepare for. And as I was writing the first one, I was also reading Farley’s Structured Input, and I started noticing that the principles I was learning about for activity design applied just as much to writing good assessment items.

That’s when things got interesting.

The tool that came out of that process is what I think of as a grammar-content matrix. For each multiple-choice item, I write four possible answers.

The correct answer required both correct grammar AND correct content. One distractor has correct grammar but wrong content, so a student who processed the form but didn’t understand the reading lands there. Another has incorrect grammar but correct content, so a student who understood the reading but didn’t process the form lands there. The fourth option is your catch-all.

From a data perspective, this is actually really useful. If a whole class is landing on correct grammar-wrong content, that’s a content gap. If they’re landing on wrong-grammar-correct-content, that’s a processing gap. Those two problems call for different responses.

I also put what I want students to process at the beginning of each answer option, not buried in the middle. If I’m targeting singular/plural verb agreement, the verb comes first. Utterance-medial forms are the hardest to process, so hiding the thing I want students to notice in the middle of a long answer choice works against the whole point.

In the convivencia unit, this logic is evident in the workbook activities. The singular/plural activities ask students to add -n to a verb if the subject is plural and leave it blank if singular. To get it right, students have to read the full conditional sentence, identify the subject, and decide whether the verb agrees with a single entity or multiple entities. It’s not “write the correct form.” It’s “understand this sentence well enough to know which form belongs here.” That’s the difference.

What I’d Change

A few honest things.

I leaned on pop-up grammar more than I needed to in the first year. Pop-ups have their place, but if I’m doing one because my activities aren’t giving students enough reason to process the form, the pop-up is a workaround, not a solution. The activity design should be doing more of that work.

I also put some SI-style items on high-stakes tests that would have been much better as low-stakes in-class activities. The grammar-content matrix works well as a diagnostic and as a learning tool. It’s less clear it belongs on a summative assessment. What I’m moving toward is keeping tests focused on content comprehension and using the grammar-content activities more frequently and at lower stakes throughout the unit, closer to when students are actually encountering the forms in input.

The convivencia workbook is the most complete version of this I’ve built so far. Every activity has a communicative Paso 2. The forms appear across multiple activity types, different verbs, and different contexts. Students aren’t just answering comprehension questions or just doing form-focused tasks. They’re doing both, in the same unit, with the same content, and then actually talking about it.

How This Could Help If You’re Tied to a Textbook

If your department requires common assessments that include grammar, SI principles give you a way to make those assessments better without blowing up the whole system.

Instead of fill-in-the-blank conjugation questions, try forced selection or a word bank that already has the form students need. Take out the conjugation step and let them focus on communicating. The correct answer requires correct form AND correct comprehension. Distractors are meaningful wrong turns, not random wrong answers. Students who haven’t processed the form can’t guess their way to the right answer by eliminating obviously wrong options.

It’s not a perfect solution, but it’s a principled compromise. And it gives you useful data about whether students are missing content or missing form, which tells you something different about what to do next.

Wrapping Up the Series

Here’s where I’ve landed after a few years of thinking about this.

Structured Input isn’t a curriculum. It’s a lens. It’s an intervention. Once you understand why students skip certain forms, you start seeing your activity design differently. You start asking whether a time marker is doing work that you meant for the verb to do. You start putting the form you care about at the front of the sentence. You start building follow-ups that require students to actually use the language rather than just complete the task.

There’s also more to say about what happens after the input work is done, specifically, how to give feedback on form in a way that builds on what students have already acquired, rather than trying to replace acquisition with correction. That’s a separate post, but it connects directly to everything in this series. Stay tuned.

The convivencia con animales unit linked below is my best attempt so far at putting all of this into practice in a content-rich, coherent unit. It’s real, it’s been used with actual students, and every activity in it is designed with these principles in mind.

If you try any of this, I’d love to hear what happens. Drop it in the comments, find me on Threads, or send a message through the podcast. That’s what the scholar-practitioner community is for :)

Okay, so now you know what’s happening inside your students’ heads when they encounter input. They’re going for meaning first. They’re skipping redundant forms. They’re assuming the first noun is the subject. They’re doing exactly what efficient language processors do.

The question is: what do you actually do with that information?

That’s what Structured Input activities are for. This post is about what they are, how to build them, and what to watch out for when you do.

The Gaslight: “SI Activities Are Just Fancy Grammar Drills”

They’re not. And this distinction matters, because if you design them like grammar drills, they won’t work the way they’re supposed to.

A grammar drill asks students to produce or identify a form. Write the correct conjugation. Circle the past tense verb. The focus is on the form itself, and meaning is optional or beside the point.

A Structured Input activity asks students to process meaning in a way that requires them to attend to form. The form is the tool, not the target. Students aren’t thinking “what’s the verb ending here?” They’re thinking “did this happen to the hippos or to the manatee?” and the only way to answer correctly is to pay attention to the form. That’s the whole design principle.

The Gatekeep: Referential and Affective Activities

There are two types of Structured Input activities, and you need both.

Referential activities refer to content that has a right or wrong answer. Students have to process the form accurately to respond correctly. These are great for anchoring form-meaning connections to something concrete and checkable.

Affective activities are personal. There’s no right or wrong answer, just different answers for different people. These move students from processing the form in context to connecting it to their own lives and opinions, which is where things get genuinely interesting.

Here’s what this looks like in practice. In my Spanish 4 unit La convivencia con animales, students read about real human-animal conflict stories: capybaras invading a gated community in Argentina, hippos disrupting ecosystems in Colombia, river dolphins threatened by invasive species, monkeys electrocuted on power lines in Costa Rica. The whole unit is content-rich, and the target structure throughout is the imperfect subjunctive in si clauses.

A referential activity from the workbook asks students to choose the correct verb from two options to complete a conditional sentence about one of the animals. For example: Si los científicos no (desplazaran / monitorearan) a la población del lince, no sabrían que se había recuperado. To answer correctly, students can’t just look at the endings. They have to understand what scientists actually do with a population, and what would happen if they didn’t. Content knowledge and form processing are doing the work together. There are correct answers, and students have to understand to get them.

An affective activity from the same unit asks students to respond personally. Si yo pudiera tener cualquier animal como mascota, ¿tendría un animal exótico como un mono o un carpincho? Mark yes or no. No right answer. But students have to process the imperfect subjunctive to understand what’s being asked, and their responses naturally lead into the Paso 2 follow-up, where they compare answers with a partner and find out who else would adopt an endangered animal if they could.

The referential activity builds the connection. The affective activity makes it personal and opens the door to real conversation.

(FYI: A full downloadable version of the convivencia unit is coming soon, with all the SI activities, reading texts, and a teacher guide. Stay tuned!)

The Girlboss: Tips for Building Your Own

These come from Common Ground (Henshaw and Hawkins), a presentation by Florencia Henshaw at ACTFL on how to transform grammar drills to SI Activities from Farley’s Structured Input, and from actually building and using these activities in class. Fair warning: I’ve made some of these mistakes myself.

Same verb, different forms. One of the most useful design moves is to use the same verb root but vary the form across items, so students have to process what each form is doing. In the convivencia unit, students see desapareciera, desaparecerían, and desapareció across different activities, all in meaningful context. They’re not drilling conjugation tables. They’re figuring out what each form means in a real sentence, and the contrast between them is doing the teaching.

Same form, different verbs. On the flip side, using multiple different verbs in the same form helps students generalize the pattern rather than memorizing one word. If every si clause in your activity uses tuviera, students might learn tuvierawithout actually acquiring the subjunctive. Vary the verbs, keep the form consistent, and you’re giving students a richer picture of how the form works.

Every activity needs a communicative follow-up. This is non-negotiable. Every single activity in the convivencia workbook has a Paso 2 that asks students to discuss, debate, compare, or defend. ¿Cuál de estas situaciones te parece más urgente? Prepárense para defender su número 1 a la clase. The Paso 2 is where the acquisition actually deepens, because students have to produce and process the form again in a context that matters to them. If you build an SI activity without a communicative follow-up, you’ve done half the job. The follow-up is not optional.

Focus on one form at a time. Just one. The whole point is to give students a reason to attend to a specific form. If you’re asking them to juggle three different things at once you’ve lost the thread.

Keep meaning in the center. If a student could complete your activity by scanning for verb endings and ignoring the content, it’s not an SI activity. It’s a grammar drill with extra steps. Students should have to understand what the sentence actually means to respond correctly.

Make the input bimodal. Students should both hear and read the language. Not complicated, just important.

Go back to the principles from Part 1. Before you finalize an activity, sit down and do it as if you were a learner. Are you accidentally giving away the answer with a time expression? Is the form buried in the middle of a long sentence? Is there too much new vocabulary competing for attention? If something makes the form redundant or invisible, redesign that item.

Make sure everything is grammatically accurate. Students should never encounter a form that wouldn’t exist in the language. Everything in the input should be something a native speaker could actually say.

One last thing worth saying: SI activities are a tool, not a method. They’re not meant to replace storytelling, reading, conversation, or any of the other things you’re already doing. They’re designed to do something specific that those other activities don’t always do on their own, which is create a moment where students have to attend to form in order to get the meaning. Use them for that, and don’t ask them to do more than that.

Next up: Part 3, SI in a Real Classroom. What I actually tried, what worked, what I’d change, and how I’ve started thinking about SI beyond discrete activities and into the bigger shape of a unit.

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.

NOTE: Eric does great work in sharing research. Check out his site!

The Gaslight: “If They Understood It, They Processed It”

This is the assumption that sneaks into many CI classrooms, including mine for a while: if students can understand the message, the form will eventually sort itself out through exposure. Comprehensible input is enough.

Here’s the thing. Comprehensible input IS necessary. But “necessary” and “sufficient” are different words, and it’s worth pausing on what “comprehensible” even means here. Terry Waltz has made a really useful distinction between comprehensible input (input that could theoretically be understood) and comprehended input (input that a learner actually understood). That’s already an important upgrade. But even comprehended input is not the same as processed input. The research on Input Processing makes a strong case that comprehension and acquisition are not the same pipeline.

So we’re actually looking at a three-step ladder: comprehensible, then comprehended, then processed. Each step is a real upgrade, and each one has implications for how you design instruction.

The Gatekeep: What Input Processing Actually Says

VanPatten’s model centers on a key concept: intake.

Intake is the part of input that actually gets processed. It’s the moment when a form-meaning connection is made, when a learner doesn’t just encounter a form but registers it, assigns a purpose to it, and starts to incorporate it into their developing linguistic system. Input can wash over a learner without ever becoming intake. Intake is the goal.

There are two core principles that explain when intake is more or less likely to happen.

Principle 1: Primacy of Meaning

Learners process input for meaning before they process it for form.

This is not bad news. It’s just how human language processing works. When we encounter language, we go for the message first. The grammatical machinery tends to come second, if at all.

For comprehension-based teachers, the first principle itself probably isn’t surprising. We already know that meaning comes first. The interesting stuff is in the sub-principles, because they tell us which parts of the meaning-grabbing process tend to crowd out form.

The Lexical Preference Principle: If learners can get grammatical information from vocabulary, they won’t pay attention to form. This one has real classroom implications. If you start every sentence about the past with yesterday or last week, you’ve removed any reason for a student to notice the verb ending. The lexical item is doing all the grammatical work, and the form becomes invisible. Not because students are lazy, but because they’re efficient.

The Sentence Location Principle: Where a form appears in a sentence affects how likely students are to process it. Items at the beginning of an utterance are most accessible; items buried in the middle are hardest to process. Farley illustrates this with the sentence John hates movies. The third-person -s on hates is mid-sentence, which makes it the least likely to be processed. The -s on movies is at the end of the sentence. John is the very first word, and the most likely to be processed. Same suffix, very different processing likelihood based on position alone.

The Preference for Nonredundancy: When a sentence contains multiple cues to the same grammatical meaning, learners will process the form that does the most unique work. If last weekend already signals past tense, the verb ending isn’t adding new information. It’s redundant, and students will skip it. Design input where the form is the only cue to meaning, and you give students a reason to actually notice it.

The Primacy of Content Words Principle: Grammatical function words, like articles, prepositions, and agreement markers, tend to get glossed over because they feel like filler compared to content words. This is part of why gender agreement in Spanish is so persistently late to develop. La versus el rarely changes the meaning of a sentence in any way that matters for comprehension, so learners accurately judge that they can ignore it, at least for now.

The Meaning Before Nonmeaning Principle: Forms that carry no semantic weight are harder to acquire because learners have no processing reason to attend to them. Noun-adjective agreement in Spanish is a classic example. The -a ending on an adjective is grammatically meaningful, but it rarely changes what the sentence means. That’s a processing obstacle you’ll need to design around.

The Availability of Resources Principle: You’ve heard shelter vocabulary, not grammar. This principle is the research backing for that idea. If learners are using all their cognitive resources just to figure out what the words mean, they have nothing left over for processing form. Flooding input with unfamiliar vocabulary doesn’t just make comprehension harder. It makes form processing nearly impossible.

Principle 2: The First Noun Principle

Learners will assume that the first noun or pronoun in a sentence is the subject, the agent, the one doing the action.

This holds across language types, including Object-Verb-Subject languages, and it’s not simply L1 transfer. It’s a default processing strategy. In most sentences, it works perfectly. But it creates predictable errors with passive constructions, sentences that start with an object, and any structure where the first noun is not the agent.

John is adored by his father often gets processed as John adores his father, because John came first, and as we know, the first noun is the doer!

BUT, three sub-principles can help sort this out:

The Lexical Semantics Principle: Swap out John for golf, and suddenly the first noun can’t logically be an agent. Golf adores his father is nonsense, so learners override the default and process correctly. Inanimate or logically implausible first nouns reduce the pull of the first-noun strategy.

The Event Probability Principle: Similarly, if the most likely real-world interpretation doesn’t match a first-noun-as-agent reading, learners are more likely to get it right. The parrot was adored by John’s father is easier to process correctly than John was adored by the parrot, because parrots adoring people is unlikely enough for learners to take another look.

The Contextual Constraint Principle: If learners already have context from a story, a prior scene, or shared classroom knowledge, they can override the first noun strategy because they already know who’s doing what to whom. This is one of the reasons story-based instruction supports form processing. The narrative gives learners the scaffolding they need.

The Girlboss: What This Means for Your Classroom

Here’s what I took from all of this, put into practical terms.

Your input design is an intervention. Every time you decide where to put a form in a sentence, whether to include a lexical time marker, or how much new vocabulary to front-load, you’re making a processing decision. The research gives you a framework for making those decisions more intentionally.

Comprehensible input is the floor, not the ceiling. Students’ understanding of the message is necessary, but it’s not enough if you want them to process the forms embedded in it. Meaningful, comprehensible input is where you start. But the form has to be doing visible work in the sentence for intake to happen.

You can’t just expose students to a form and wait. If every sentence that uses the preterite also starts with ayer or la semana pasada, you may be providing tons of input without ever giving students a chance to focus on the verb ending. The input is comprehended. It may not be producing intake for that form.

Start small. None of this requires an overhaul. Pick one form you think most students are ready to acquire. Look at the activities you already have and ask: Am I accidentally making this form redundant or invisible? If so, what’s one thing I could change? That’s it. That’s the start.

Next up: Part 2, How to Design Activities That Actually Force Form-Meaning Connections. That’s where Structured Input activities come in, and where we’ll get into referential vs. affective activities, how to sequence them, and what this actually looks like with real classroom content.

Further Reading:
Structured Input: Grammar Instruction for the Acquisition-Oriented Classroom- Andrew P. Farley
Proficiency-Based Instruction: Teaching Grammar for Proficiency- Catherine Ritz and Mike Travers, ACTFL
Eric Herman’s Acquisition Classroom Memo
While We’re on the Topic- Bill VanPatten, ACTFL
Common Ground- Florencia Henshaw and Maris Hawkins

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.

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The Gaslight: Myths About Research and Teachers

Let’s name a few things people believe about SLA research and classroom teachers that just aren’t true. I might water some things down for the sake of brevity, so feel free to chime in in the comments if you want to expand on something!

“Research is for academics, not practitioners.” Research is for people who have a question and want to see if anyone has found an answer. And wouldn’t you know it, academics AND practitioners have questions and want to know if anyone has found an answer to their questions. Are there barriers blocking practitioners from reading research? Unfortunately, yes. It can cost a lot to access journals without institutional access, the language of academics can be technical and full of jargon, and who has the time to read research? Barriers aside, if you have a question that you’re curious enough to investigate, research IS for you.

“If I can’t access the full study, it doesn’t count.” Paywalls are real and genuinely annoying, but they are not the end of the road. More on this in a minute.

“I need to understand all of the research before I can use any of it.” There are parts of research that really aren’t that important if you’re just trying to learn something new or support what you’re already doing. Don’t waste your time trying to figure out whether knowing the function of Cohen’s d is important. Keep reading for some tips on what I do when I do get my hands on research.

“The research will tell me exactly what to do.” It won’t, and that’s not a bug it’s a feature. Research gives you a basis for a decision, not a script for your classroom. Your job is to translate, not replicate (unless you want to do some action research!).

The Gatekeep: What “Using Research” Actually Looks Like

Here’s a framework I’ve found useful. When I encounter a study on a podcast, at a conference session, from a colleague, or from an abstract on Google Scholar, I try to run it through four questions.

Note* A reader noticed I didn’t mention anything about the Abstract. Always start with the abstract to get an idea of what you might get out of the article. Thanks for catching that, Chris!

1. What was the question? Every study starts with a problem or a gap. Before you do anything else, make sure you understand what the researchers were actually trying to find out. You don’t want to be halfway through an article about adult learners in a university immersion program when you’re looking to make decisions about what to do in a 9th-grade Spanish 2 class. Knowing the original question helps you figure out how much translation is needed.

2. What did they do, and with whom? Participants, context, duration, design. You don’t need to memorize the methods section. You just need enough to ask: Does this look anything like my classroom? A 6-week study with 12 graduate students is interesting. It may also not tell you much about what happens with 28 fourteen-year-olds over the course of a semester. That’s not to say you won’t find anything helpful, but keep your context in mind.

3. What did they find? The results. What actually happened? What was the effect size, if they report one? Was the difference statistically significant AND meaningfully large? (These are not the same thing: Statistical significance is a term used to say that the results of a study didn’t happen by chance, while meaningfully large, is, well… the difference was large.) If the abstract says something like “students in the treatment group showed significantly higher scores,” your follow-up question is: how much higher, and does that difference matter in a real classroom?

4. What does this mean for my teaching? This is the step most research summaries skip, and it’s the one that actually matters. Based on what this study found and what I know about my students and the context, what might I try? What would I watch for? What would tell me it’s working?

That last question is the bridge between research and practice. It doesn’t require a doctorate. It requires curiosity, a willingness to pay attention, and a desire to keep learning.

Okay, But Where Do You Actually Find Studies?

Fair question. A few practical places to start:

Google Scholar is free and surprisingly useful. You can usually access abstracts, and many researchers post full versions of their work on their university pages or on sites like ResearchGate. If you find a study you want but can’t access, searching the title plus “PDF” will get you further than you’d expect.

The researchers themselves. This sounds wild, but it works. Many academics are genuinely delighted when teachers reach out. A polite email asking whether they have a freely accessible version of their paper has a better hit rate than you might think.

Synthesizers and knowledge brokers. You don’t have to go directly to primary sources every time. Books like Common Ground (Henshaw & Hawkins) and magazines like The Language Educator (ACTFL) do a lot of translation work for you. Additionally, podcasts, like ours, exist specifically because the gap between research and practice is real and bridgeable.

Your own bookshelf. If you’ve read any methodology books, you already have theoretical frameworks in your hands. Common Ground (Henshaw & Hawkins), TPRS with Chinese Characteristics (Waltz), and While We’re on the Topic (VanPatten) are research-informed, and practitioner-oriented. Start there.

The Girlboss: How to Actually Do This

Here’s what I’d suggest if you want to get more comfortable using research in your teaching without drowning in it.

Start with a question you already have. Don’t go looking for research in the abstract. Start with something you’re genuinely wondering about “Why do my students understand what I say but still produce the same errors?” or “Does the order I introduce vocabulary actually matter?” Then go looking. You’ll read more carefully when it’s a question you care about.

Read one study all the way through, once. Not to master it. Just to see what it feels like. Notice what you understand, what confuses you, and what surprises you. The confusion is not a sign that research isn’t for you; it’s a sign that you’re encountering something new and pushing yourself. Keep at it!

Find one thing to try. Not an overhaul. NOT an overhaul. NOT. AN. OVERHAUL. You’ll thank yourself. Teachers already have to think of a million things at once, you do not need to put curricular overhaul on your to-do list. So. Start with one small thing. If a study suggests that putting the form you want students to notice at the beginning of a sentence makes it more likely they’ll process it, try that in one activity next week. See what happens. Just tip your toe in,

Talk to someone about it. The best thing about research is that it gives you something specific to discuss. “I read something interesting about how students process input. Can I run something by you?” is a much better conversation starter than “SLAyyy says....” This is what professional learning communities are supposed to be for: curiosity and discovering together to be best for our students.

Be okay with not knowing yet. One study doesn’t settle anything. Research is a conversation that’s been happening for decades, and you’re walking in mid-sentence. That’s fine. You don’t need to moderate the debate between implicit and explicit instruction before third period on Tuesday. You just need to make one decision that’s a little more informed than the one you made last year.

That’s the frame. In the posts that follow, I’m going to be using it a lot pointing to research, explaining what it found, and thinking through what it might mean for a real classroom. Sometimes I’ll have used a strategy and will be able to tell you how it went. Sometimes I’ll be working it out in real time right alongside you.

That’s what it means to be a scholar-practitioner. You’re not waiting until you have all the answers. You’re in the room, paying attention, and getting a little better every time.

Let’s get into it and SLAyyy!

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