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At the end of every school year, I ask my students one question:
What activity or strategy helped you grow the most in Spanish this year?
This year, their answers surprised me.
Some students chose Daily Personal Questions. Others selected Silent Sustained Reading. Some preferred podcasts, cultural articles, Calendar Talk, Star Student Interviews, content-based units, or creating stories.
What stood out most?
Nobody agreed.
And that led me to an important realization about language acquisition, student engagement, and comprehensible input.
In this episode of Growing With Proficiency: The Podcast, I reflect on what my students taught me about Dr. Stephen Krashen's concept of optimal input and why the search for the "perfect" activity may be keeping us from creating truly sustainable language classes.
If you've ever wondered how to keep students engaged while providing rich, comprehensible input throughout the entire school year, this episode is for you.
✨ In this episode, you'll learn:
• Why there is no single activity that every student finds engaging or effective
• What my students' survey responses revealed about language acquisition
• How to provide compelling, comprehensible, rich, and abundant input
• Why students need multiple entry points into the language
• How daily routines like Silent Sustained Reading, Calendar Talk, podcasts, and Daily Personal Questions support acquisition
• Why 50 or 90 minutes of any one activity can become exhausting
• The planning shift that transformed my classroom and reduced decision fatigue
• How routines create a more sustainable world language classroom
Whether you teach Spanish, French, German, Latin, Chinese, or another language, this episode will help you rethink student engagement and build a classroom that is both acquisition-driven and sustainable.
🎧 Listen now.
Resources Mentioned
🖥️ CIReboot 2026
📌 Student reflection survey.
📌 Download the free Teacher Guide:
https://growingwithproficiency.com/teacherguide
📌 Join the waitlist for Growing With Proficiency: The Spanish Teacher Academy:
https://growingwithproficiency.com/academy
📌 Follow Claudia on Instagram @claudiamelliott
📌 Growing With CI FB Community
📌Blog
📌 Teacher Pay Teachers Store
The Spanish Teacher Academy supports Spanish teachers in building effective and sustainable classrooms. Inside the Academy, teachers gain clarity about language acquisition, access ready-to-use units and monthly resources, and receive ongoing support—so they can use more Spanish in class without burning out.
👉 Learn more and join the Academy at growingwithproficiency.com
