At the end of every school year, I ask my students to complete a reflection survey. One of my favorite questions is:
What activity or strategy helped you grow the most in Spanish this year?
Every year, I look forward to reading their answers. Sometimes they surprise me. Sometimes they confirm what I already suspected. This year, they did both.
I gave students a list of activities and routines that we used throughout the year and asked them to select all the ones that helped them grow in Spanish. The list included Daily Personal Questions, Silent Sustained Reading, Calendar Talk, Panorama Cultural articles, Star Student Interviews, Creating Stories, Listening to Podcasts, and our content-based units.
What happened next was interesting.
Most students selected four, five, or even six different activities.
Then I asked them to choose their favorite.
My Spanish 1 students chose our Daily Personal Questions. My Spanish 3 students selected Silent Sustained Reading. Other students chose our cultural articles, podcasts, or content units.
Nobody agreed and the results were pretty close. That was probably the most important thing I learned from the survey.
The Challenge of Creating Compelling Input
As world language teachers, many of us are trying to provide what Dr. Stephen Krashen calls optimal input: input that is comprehensible, compelling, rich, and abundant.
The comprehensible part? We can work on that.
The abundant part? We can usually figure that out too.
The compelling part is where things become difficult.
Because students are different.
Some students love stories. Some students love reading. Some students love learning about culture, and others love talking about themselves.
You also have students who prefer independent reading while others prefer reading as a class or even better create their own stories.
There is no single activity that every student finds compelling.
And I think that is where many of us get stuck. We spend so much time looking for the perfect strategy, the perfect unit, the perfect novel, or the perfect activity when the reality is that it doesn’t exist.
When I Put All My Eggs in One Instructional Basket
When I first started learning about comprehensible input, I didn’t have many tools in my toolbox. Every time I learned a new strategy, I became completely obsessed with it.
When I discovered novels, I wanted to read novels every day.
When I learned how to create stories with students, I wanted to create stories all the time.
When I developed content-based units around topics like Las Cholitas Escaladoras, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, or the Atacama Desert, I wanted to spend entire class periods immersed in those topics.
The problem wasn’t the novel or the story or the content unit.
The problem was that ninety minutes of anything can become exhausting.
I remember spending days talking about the same characters in a novel. By the third day, my students were tired. If I’m honest, so was I.
The same thing happened with creating stories. Some students absolutely loved them. Others wanted to learn about something that felt more connected to the real world.
What I learned is that students need different entry points into the language.
When we only provide one pathway, some students connect and others disconnect.
The Shift That Changed My Planning
Over the years, I stopped asking myself:
What activity am I doing today?
Instead, I started asking:
What opportunities for input am I providing today?
That small shift completely changed how I plan.
Now, instead of building an entire class around one activity, I think about creating multiple opportunities for students to connect with the language.
Some opportunities are interactive, others are independent. Some are related to culture and the outside world. Others are personal. Some activities involve reading, others listening.
Together, they create a richer experience for more students.
Daily Personal Questions: My Students’ Favorite Routine
This year’s winner in Spanish 1 was our Daily Personal Questions, and this didn’t surprise me.
Students love talking about themselves.
Every day, I post a question. Sometimes it is something simple like:
- How are you feeling this week?
- What are your plans for the weekend?
- What class do you like the most?
- Did you sleep well last night?
Students write their answers and then we share.
At the beginning of the year, many students are shy. I do a lot of the talking. I narrate their answers. I ask follow-up questions. I help students listen to one another.
As the year progresses, the conversations become more natural. Students begin to recognize similarities.
They discover who works after school, who plays sports, who stays up too late studying, and who is excited about an upcoming trip.
This activity is a community-building activity and it contributes tremendously to our classroom culture, and because we revisit high-frequency language over and over again, students continue hearing and understanding language they actually need.
A Different Kind of Input
Silent Sustained Reading
My Spanish 3 students selected Silent Sustained Reading as their favorite activity.
I think many of us underestimate how much students appreciate quiet and also choice.
My classroom can be loud. We interact, discuss, move, and communicate throughout the period. Silent Sustained Reading provides a different experience.
Students grab a book and read. That’s it.
My Spanish 1 students read for about six minutes. My Spanish 3 students read for about ten.
Afterward, they complete a reading log and choose from several reflection activities.
What I love about Silent Sustained Reading is the amount of language students can access over time. It is consistent, low-stress, and allows students to choose texts that interest them.
Some students love novels.
Some prefer nonfiction.
My heritage speakers often select more advanced books.
Everyone enters through a different door.
I have to make a disclaimer about SSR in my class. I have a lot of books and I have a lot of easy books. I think that was key. My students had a lot of choices.
Calendar Talk: More Than the Date and Weather
I know Calendar Talk can be controversial.
Some teachers love it.
Some teachers try it once and never want to do it again.
For me, Calendar Talk isn’t really about the calendar. It’s about using what’s happening in our students’ lives as a source of communication.
Yes, we talk about the day, the date, and the weather. But we also talk about long weekends, school events, sports, concerts, holidays, and upcoming plans.
When we have a four-day week, my students celebrate.
When there is a football game, we talk about it.
When students have performances, competitions, or interviews, we talk about those too.
The calendar simply gives us a reason to have meaningful conversations using highly frequent language.
Adding Podcasts and Cultural Articles
This year I added two new routines that my students really enjoyed.
The first was a monthly podcast.
Inspired by Marta Ruiz Yedinak’s Cuéntame Podcast, I developed a simple listening routine that we completed once each month.
My students listened, interacted with the content, and discussed what they heard.
It became one more opportunity for comprehensible input.
The second addition was Panorama Cultural.
Once a month, students selected a cultural article, listened to the audio, and completed activities independently or with a partner.
What I loved about this routine was the balance.
Students had choice.
Students learned about the Spanish-speaking world.
Students worked at their own pace.
And because the activities were already prepared, I had a little breathing room too.
Why These Routines Matter for Language Acquisition
There is another reason I value these routines.
They allow us to use highly frequent language consistently.
A few years ago, in episode 41 of Growing With Proficiency The Podcast, I had a fascinating conversation with Dr. Florencia Henshaw about the language we use in our classrooms. She reminded me that many upper-level classes spend significant time discussing topics that are not part of everyday life.
We talk about environmental issues, social justice, economics, and global challenges.
These topics are important.
But students also need opportunities to talk about their friends, their families, their jobs, their sports, and their weekends.
Those everyday conversations provide repeated exposure to language that students will use again and again.
And repetition matters.
Language acquisition is slow.
It is gradual.
Students often understand much more than they can produce.
The more opportunities we create to hear and interact with meaningful language, the more likely acquisition becomes.
Why Daily Routines Reduce Planning
One of the biggest benefits of these routines is that they make teaching more sustainable.
When students know the structure, they need less explanation.
When routines are established, transitions become easier.
When materials are prepared ahead of time, planning becomes simpler.
I still create stories.
I still teach content-based units.
I still explore culture.
But these routines provide the foundation that supports everything else.
They reduce decision fatigue for me and create predictability for my students.
And after twenty years in the classroom, I have learned that predictable does not mean boring.
Predictable can be incredibly powerful.
Three Questions to Think About Before Next School Year
As you begin thinking about next year, I want to leave you with three questions:
What routines could you use consistently throughout the year?
What opportunities for input are you providing outside of your main unit or novel?
What could you prepare before the school year starts to make your teaching more sustainable?
The biggest lesson my students taught me this year wasn’t that one activity was better than another.
It was that different students need different pathways into the language.
And maybe our job isn’t to find the perfect strategy.
Maybe our job is to create multiple opportunities for students to connect with language every single day.
