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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…

Listen now

2 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.

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

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 :)

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 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

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!

FREE SLAyyy Research-Use Note-Catcher!

We recorded this as a livestream as part of the CI Reboot 2026 online conference. Interested in learning more? Register now with the discount code SLAYY2026 !!! And go forth and SLAY!

Gaslight

Please Don’t Burn Yourself Out!

Know Your Context

Gatekeep - Wadas, M., Goetze, J., & Jackson, C. (2024). Going above and beyond: Motivations of L2 German learners to (dis)continue language study. Die Unterrichtspraxis/Teaching German, 57, 87–102.

Girlboss

Meditating on the Ideal Self

Don’t Waste Your Own Time!

Love Culture, and Develop a Growth Mindset

References

Social Accounts:

Facebook

Bluesky

Instagram

CI Reboot - fully online conference for CCLT - use affiliate code SLAYY2026

Ben’s Blog Post About Program Growth

Mike Peto - Las maravillas

The German Club Ideas List

Ben Fisher-Rodriguez, Bill Langley

Main Points

SLAyyy: Second Language Acquisition for Everyone Website

Gaslight

Strategies Are Not Top of Mind

How to Balance Test Prep and Real World Use

Target Language Usage vs. L1 Talk About Metacognition

Gatekeep - Sarafianou, Anna & Gavriilidou, Zoe. (2015). The effect of strategy-based instruction on strategy use by upper-secondary Greek students of EFL. Electronic Journal of Foreign Language Teaching. 12. 21-34.

Types of Strategies

Teaching Strategies → Knowing Strategies!

But What Do the Strategies…Do?

Girlboss

Teaching the Use of Logical Connectors (and Complete Sentences)

Breaking Words Down

Use Up Those Commercial Breaks!

References

Social Accounts:

Facebook

Bluesky

Instagram

CI Reboot - fully online conference for CCLT - use affiliate code SLAYY2026

AnneMarie Chase - 20 Questions

Bryce Hedstrom - Reading Bookmark

Lack of Communicative Purpose

Bad Input! Bad!

Need for Scaffolding

We Teach Much More Than Language

Gatekeep - Sadri, E. & Tahririan, M.H.. (2018). Teacher-assisted vs. peer-assisted performances and L2 development: A mixed methods approach. Journal of Research in Applied Linguistics. 9. 3-27.

When Do Students Get the Most Gains from Peer Assistance?

Feedback Amount and Quality

What This Feedback Accomplished

Girlboss

Bill’s Framework That Slays

The Question of Proportion

Interactive Tasks That Are Secretly Input

Real Tasks, Really Supported

References

Social Accounts:

Facebook

Bluesky

Instagram

Timothy Chávez on Instagram and His Website!

Examples of Tasks shared by Timothy

Arcoíris from The Comprehensible Classroom

Huellas from Somewhere to Share

AnneMarie Chase - AP Strategies

Overview of Can Do Statements

Proficiency, Performance, Can Do!

What is Intercultural Communication?

Function, Context, Text Type

Changes from 2017

Cultural Self-Knowledge

Minor Semantic Changes

Girlboss

Use Them For Planning!

References

Social Accounts:

Facebook

Bluesky

Instagram

Avant ADVANCE - Proficiency Level Training

Language Functions List from The Keys to Planning for Learning

Facilitated Interdependent Language Learning (FILL) - blog by Michele Anciaux Aoki

Gaslight

What is school supposed to look like?

Misalignment of Objectives

Holistic Thinking vs. Right/Wrong Answers

Gatekeep - Kürüm, E. Y. (2025). Evaluating the Effectiveness of a Comprehension-Based Language Teaching: A Large-Scale Pretest-Posttest Study. RumeliDE Dil ve Edebiyat Araştırmaları Dergisi, (47), 140-155.

Want to learn about CEFR and ACTFL comparisons? Click here!

ACTFL’s Inverted Pyramid

Girlboss

Get Connected!

iFLT/TPRS/CI Teaching Facebook Group

ACTFL Special Interest Groups

See below for conferences mentioned!

References

Social Accounts:

Facebook

Bluesky

Instagram

Mitten CI, April 17-18, Saline, Michigan (outside Detroit),

Comprehensible Iowa, June 12-13th, Des Moines, Iowa

The CI Summit, July 15-17, Cincinnati, Ohio

The Agen Workshop, Agen, France, July 20-25

CI Reboot, all online, June 20-27

Gaslight

Talking Yourself Out of Them

Brain Breaks vs. Games

Focus vs. Energize

Perception of Brain Breaks

Gatekeep

Sharpe, B. T., Trotter, M. G., & Hale, B. J. (2025). Sustaining student concentration: The effectiveness of micro-breaks in a classroom setting. Frontiers in Psychology, 16, 1589411.

Do students perform better on quizzes and tests if they get regularly microbreaks during class time?

Girlboss

Meditation and Box Breaths

Games with Patterns

Simpler!

References

Social Accounts:

Facebook

Bluesky

Instagram

Headspace - meditation app, free for educators!

Calm - Breathe Bubble (for quick mindfulness in class)

Say the Word to the Beat Examples - Spanish, German

Heads Up, 7 Up - Spanish, German

Category Clapping from Claudia Elliott

Gaslight

Overreliance on Translation

The Need for TL Usage

No Translation Ever! …Or?

Gatekeep

Does Translation Contribute to SLA?

How Do Students Perceive Translation in SLA?

Choral Translation

Girlboss

Use Judiciously!

Keep Proficiency Level in Mind

References

Social Accounts:

Facebook

Bluesky

Instagram

Bryce Hedstrom - Stuff for Spanish Class

Keith Toda - Stultus (Liar!) Game (Ben’s note: it turns out “stultus” means something more like “stupid”! I use the word for “Lie!”)

Ben Fisher-Rodriguez, Bill Langley

Main Points

SLAyyy: Second Language Acquisition for Everyone Website

Gaslight

Where’s the consistency?

How to Deal with Reluctant or Resistant Students

Hesitate! Slow Down!

Gatekeep

Principles of TPR: Not Just Commands

Connecting Language to the Body

Lowering Anxiety

Girlboss

TPR, or Gestures?

Model - Hesitate - Stop

Left-Brain “School” Processing Activities

TPR for Upper Levels

References

Social Accounts:

Facebook

Bluesky

Instagram

Jon Cowart’s Website

Berty Segal Cook - Teaching English Through Action

James Asher - Learning Another Language Through Actions

Contee Seely - TPR is More Than Commands

The Class That Just Won’t Talk

Planning and Grading Struggle Bus

Accountable Reading

Explicitly Talking About Why We Do What We Do

Gatekeep

Book Study Takeaways

Synonym Stacking

Pronunciation Fun

Girlboss

Having a Unit Framework Slays!

Kicking Butt and Taking Names

References

Social Accounts:

Facebook

Bluesky

Instagram

The Partner Speaking / Q+A Game

Bill’s Unit Planning Framework

Independent Textivities from the Comprehensible Classroom

Bill’s Post for the Educational Knowledge Network: Podcasts as Tools for Knowledge Brokers: How We’re Working to Make Evidence Accessible, Relevant, and Actionable

Gaslight

Grammar as a Concept

Do ACTFL levels describe language development?

Use of the L2 in Grammar Explanations

Balancing Authentic/Found Resources and Created Resources

Gatekeep - Proficiency-Based Instruction: Teaching Grammar for Proficiency by Ritz and Travers

Teaching Grammar? Start with Input!

Referential and Affective Tasks in Structured Input

Bill Talks about SI and Eats It Up

Performance and Proficiency

Girlboss

Form-Focused Feedback

Structured Input 2: Electric Boogaloo

Rethinking Our Relationship to Grammar

References

Social Accounts:

Facebook

Bluesky

Instagram

Stacy’s BlueSky Account

Language Learner Literature Advisory Board - reviews of readers for issues of identity/bias

Stacy’s Session at ACTFL 2025: Friday, 4:30pm, Room 213

Ben’s SideBar at ACTFL 2025: Saturday, 11-11:45am

Common Ground: Second Language Acquisition Theory Goes to the Classroom by Henshaw and Hawkins

Timothy Chavez’ Instagram Account - language teaching research and practice

Ben Fisher-Rodriguez, Bill Langley

Main Points

SLAyyy: Second Language Acquisition for Everyone Website

Gaslight

Parking on New Vocabulary

Allowing for Negotiating Meaning

Talking Ourselves Out of Using the TL

Gatekeep - Adu, Michael & Abunya, Levina & Owusu, Edward & Budu, Gifty. (2025). THE IMPACT OF INTERACTION ON SECOND-LANGUAGE ACQUISITION AND LISTENING. 31-42.

Input + Interaction

Quantity + Redundancy + Complexity

Girlboss

Teach to the Eyes (Despite the “Gen Z Stare”)

Teaching Students How to React

Synonym Stacking

MODEL EVERYTHING

References

Proficiency-Based Instruction: Teaching Grammar for Proficiency by Ritz and Travers

Social Accounts:

Facebook

Bluesky

Instagram

Bill’s Rules

Ben’s TL Usage Reflection

Dr. Liam Printer and The Motivated Classroom Podcast

Carrie Toth’s “Discussion Thursdays”

Krashen and Mason: “Comprehension-Aiding Supplementation”

What is it that we want to / have to teach?

There Is No Faking a Storyteller’s Intention

“One Day, You Will Have a Real Conversation”

Gatekeep - Jim Wooldridge

What does the life of a kid look like?

The Novelty Disappears - What is the Driving Reason?

Start With Your Problem and Communicative Purpose

Girlboss

Know Your Context and Know Your Students

Bring Diverse Stories to the Classroom

Tell Your Stories, Explore How to Make Other Stories Work

Does the repetition “teach the structure,” or serve the story?

References

Proficiency-Based Instruction: Teaching Grammar for Proficiency by Ritz and Travers

Social Accounts:

Facebook

Bluesky

Instagram

Woology Facebook Group

Conversations About Language Teaching Podcast

Gaslight

Challenge and Accommodation

The Neverending Rubric

Time Investment

Stuck Between a Rock and a Hard Place

Gatekeep - Tajik, O., Noor, S. & Golzar, J. Investigating differentiated instruction and the contributing factors to cater EFL students’ needs at the collegial level. Asian. J. Second. Foreign. Lang. Educ. 9, 74 (2024).

Universal Design for Learning (UDL)

Content, Process, Product, Learning Environment

Girlboss

Diverse Tips for Differentiating!

References

Proficiency-Based Instruction: Teaching Grammar for Proficiency by Ritz and Travers

Social Accounts:

Facebook

Bluesky

Instagram

Feedback Options (via Meredith White)