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Growing With Proficiency The Podcast
Welcome to Growing With Proficiency: The Podcast! Are you a World Language teacher who is looking for ideas, strategies, activities, and inspiration to create a World Language class where you and your students enjoy using the language to learn about the world and each other? Do you want to transform your class into an acquisition-driven instruction space where you intentionally provide a ton of comprehensible input?
If you are, you're in the right place.
Let's start this journey together. Head over to IG, and send me a DM @claudiamelliott to let me know what topics you would like me to cover in an upcoming episode.Join my free Facebook community, Growing With C. Also, check out my blog to start discovering some of these ideas and strategies at growingwithproficiency.com
Growing With Proficiency The Podcast
Episode 165: Listening to Silence: How to Use It to Understand and Engage Your Students in the Language Classroom
Silence in the language classroom doesn’t mean students aren’t saying anything. Silence is information.
In this episode of Growing With Proficiency: The Podcast, we explore why silence can be a valuable source of information and how teachers can use it to foster curiosity, lower risk, and create more meaningful engagement.
You’ll learn:
- The 3 main reasons students don’t respond to questions
- How to make your questions comprehensible and accessible
- Low-prep strategies that lower response risk and boost participation
- Ways to connect unit content to your students’ lives without rewriting your curriculum
Resources mentioned in this episode:
- Episode 161 with Becca Silver: Moving Past the “Shoulds”
- Episode 157 with Dr. Karen Lichtman & Jason Fritze: Three Key Skills for Teaching Acquisition
- Episode 54 with Paulino Brenner: Asking Better Questions in the Language Classroom
- Episode 88 with Dr. Bill VanPatten: What about Output?
If you’re ready to reframe silence from something frustrating to something informative, this episode will give you practical tools and a new perspective to bring into your classroom tomorrow.
More resources:
- Join the waitlist for Growing With Proficiency: The Spanish Teacher Academy → growingwithproficiency.com/academy
- Follow me on Instagram @claudiamelliott
- 📑 Discover culturally rich, month-specific resources for Spanish classes in my TPT Store: Growing With Proficiency.
