Practical Proficiency Podcast

#44 - Making 25 Minutes Count: Elementary Language Teaching With Cognitive Load Theory

• Devon Gunning | La Libre Language Learning • Season 3 • Episode 44

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Feeling stuck on the same unit while your elementary learners still “haven’t mastered it”? Let’s flip the script. We take a clear-eyed look at short, 25–30 minute language classes and show how cognitive load theory can make those minutes add up to real, joyful progress—without grinding through endless repetitions of the same theme.

We break down intrinsic, extraneous, and germane load in plain language and apply them to young learners’ brains. You’ll hear why rituals shrink mental friction, how to craft compelling input with a tiny set of high-value phrases, and how to recycle language through new contexts so kids actually remember. We share a simple four-part lesson arc—ritual, input, spiral, high‑energy exit—that works whether you see students daily or once a week. Along the way, we challenge the myth of “mastery” in language learning and offer a practical 70–75% rule to decide when to move on.

You’ll also get concrete ideas you can run tomorrow: use songs and stories to boost comprehensible input, lean into parroting and rhyme to lower barriers, and anchor a term with a class play or storybook project that naturally spirals vocabulary and structures over time. We talk schema building vs memorizing lists, how to balance nouns with high-frequency verbs and connectors, and why trimming English instructions can supercharge focus in the target language. By the end, you’ll have a blueprint for making short lessons memorable, sustainable, and fun—for you and your students.

If this helped, follow the show, share it with a colleague, and leave a quick review so more teachers can find it. Got a question you want us to dig into next? Send it our way—we’d love to feature it.

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SPEAKER_00:

Welcome, welcome, welcome to 2026, y'all. This is the first podcast of the year, and it's gonna be a juicy one. As promised from our last podcast, there's a great listener question that I'm excited to answer with you today because I get this question a lot, and it's something really important for the world language community as a whole, but it's specifically for our friends in the elementary realm. So if you work with littles, this one's for you. Let's dive in. Hey, welcome to 2026. I'm your host, Devin of La Libre Language Learning, and I am the creator of the practical proficiency curriculum. I work a lot with schools and districts looking to make their programs more proficiency-oriented in a way that is very practical, sustainable, and joyful for teachers, and respects their teaching context, their personalities, and the students that they work with. So this is a great question from Charlotte. Thanks so much for submitting this. Um, I'm excited to talk about this question because again, I get this question a lot, and I think that the under the elementary community is very underserved in the world language world, but there's a lot that we need to take from the elementary world of working with young learners that is applicable to everybody, right? So this is especially for you, a shout out for you if you work with students under the age of 12, but it is also relevant for everyone because, and specifically because, not because the whole episode is relevant for you, but because we're gonna be talking a lot about cognitive load theory or CLT from an educational researcher named John Sweller. So that's what we're gonna use to answer this question today. And without further ado, here's a dang question. So Charlotte asks, I am finding myself eager to move on, but I'm not sure that they've mastered the content. Can you guys relate if you're in the elementary circle? I definitely feel that. The other part of her question is I only have short 25 to 30 minute lessons. Yikes, that is short. How can I ensure that they retain the knowledge without staying on the same topic for ages? And I teach ages uh KS1 through KS2 French. So if you are a US teacher like me, we have an international audience, but I definitely had to look this up. So if you are not from the UK, KS1 and KS2 is uh something that refers to elementary programs in the UK. So with that in mind, let's talk a little bit more about where this where this class of learners is coming from. So we've got the UK primary group, which is usually ages 5 through 11, and then we have that same group under a different name with US F L E S teachers, and all of them have in common, whether you teach KS1 and KS2, or you're teaching elementary immersion, or it which is what we call it in the US, or if you're in Canada teaching a lot of those like required um don't quote me on this, Canadian teachers, but I know I've worked with a couple of y'all who say that a lot of your programs start like with required French in like fifth or sixth grade. Um, but this is something that we have, no matter which country we're teaching from, this is uh a big issue that people are facing, which is I don't have enough time to teach my children. So 25 minutes is brutal. Let's go ahead and say that up front, that that's rough. However, you're working with young learners who have an attention span that that actually works pretty well for what their cognitive load can, how you can best work with the cognitive load of a young learner. Now let's talk about the young learner of a language for a little bit first. Number one, young learners are beautiful little sponges. They are excellent at replicating the sounds of a new language. They don't really need to worry that much about the syntax or the structure of the new language because their brain is already ready for it. This is a big thing in SLA that has a huge advantage for your younger learners, and it is why every teacher in the US is like, oh my God, can we please teach language earlier? These middle schoolers and these high schoolers are having a much harder time than they need to. So, first thing is this is great that you in the UK have a required program this early on. However, we need to make sure that we're maximizing it, especially. Um, Charlotte didn't say how often she's seeing her students, but that makes a big difference because a 30-minute class every day is like beautiful, the dream, right? But if you only see them once a week, that ultra sucks. And so we've got some things that we need to work on to see how we can maximize this uh input time and production time that you have with students. So let's get into it. Actually, just kidding, before we get into it, I want to make sure that I'm giving you a clear transparency note here, which is that often in the whenever I'm researching for things now, I rely on the power of my little AI partner, Gemini, to make the research easier for me. But don't worry, this is all fact-checked as well. But the nice thing about using AI to help me with some of this research is that I can look through a lot of web pages a lot faster and then the work becomes fact-checking it instead of coming up with all of the research myself. And I would suggest for you too that if you have questions like this, that if you have a reliable AI tool at your disposal, AI is never going to replace your job. Remember that? Remember when they tried to replace teachers? Remember how funny that was? That's never gonna happen. But what AI can do for you in your classroom, and what I am also using it to do is a lot of the stuff that you would, let's say, if you had the ability to, you know, like hire a full-time TA or to have a student assistant at your disposal to be like, hey, can you look up for me these terms and synthesize them for me into an outline? Like you, we're talking a lot about cognitive load today, and you do not need to be spending your extremely valuable emotional and cognitive load on small things that AI can do for you. And so that's what I did today is I let AI do the initial research for me that was then checked. So here we go. Let's jump into cognitive load theory and how we can answer this question for you using some of these principles combined with SLA. The main question that you have here is the question that all elementary teachers have, which is I only have so much time with my students. It's extremely short, it's a race against the clock, and since I see them at such intermittent intervals, I can't just keep teaching the same animal unit for weeks and weeks and weeks on end. And you're right, because you're gonna lose them if you do that. So we're gonna use some of these concepts from cognitive load theory to see if we can make your elementary class what it was meant to be, which is more of instead of moving from unit to unit in a young learner classroom, things that work really well with young learners when you only see them for short periods of time, especially if it's uh not very frequent, like once a week, or even like once every two weeks, yikes, then what you're looking for is a way to introduce some very doable language, make it be really, really fun and memorable for them, and then work the rest of that period that you have to recycle it and to help it move into the short-term memory pool, into the long-term memory pool. Then you're gonna move the next time you see them into a way that you can work with those same like three to ten terms that you were working with last week in a new context, because the new context is what really helps your students move from that short-term to long-term memory. If you're just moving through a unit that wasn't really built for you as an elementary program, like maybe you're using a middle school designed program, like there's a lot of really popular proficiency middle school design programs that like will not work for elementary because of this key issue. So they're they're great if you have nothing else and to reduce your own cognitive load. Do it by all means. But let's see if we can adapt those so that it makes sense for your learner. So, how is cognitive load theory going to help us today? First, let's understand exactly what it is. So, 1988, we have John Sweller, this educational research, working with the working memory of anybody learning a new concept. And we come, this whole idea is one of the original first discussions on cognitive load. And so that's thinking about like how much can your brain handle at one time if it's new information or if it's new stimuli. So with a child, a child's working memory is we're looking at, you know, ages five through 11. There's a lot of nuances in those age categories, by the way, but to make this elementary episode um relevant to as many elementary teachers as possible, we're gonna cover um K through sixth grade for this. So in that working memory, we're working with a small cup, and your long-term memory for a child is actually pretty big. It's an ocean. So when it comes to a very short class period in 25 minutes, you're only gonna be able to get a little bit into their working memory before it starts to spill over. Here are three types of cognitive load on the brain to help you differentiate between like, well, what are those three things? So we have three. Number one is the intrinsic load, then we have extraneous load, and then we have germane load. So let's look at these in a little bit more detail. The first one is intrinsic load, which means like how heavy is your content? How difficult for is for your brain is it to process? So we have in here the difficulty of the language that you're presenting or you're working with in input or interaction, all that, is just how difficult that language is for learners of a specific language. Then you're gonna be looking at what is the extraneous cognitive loan. Like if your brain is already worrying on overtime as a 10-year-old looking at all this new language and trying to process it, extraneous load is the stuff that's gonna gum up the gears. So it's often called things like the mental junk, and it'll be things like a lot of um external stimuli that's distracting to the processes of the brain. For many of us in the elementary sphere, this is gonna be all of the talking, like the screaming, the noise that elementary learners love, love, love, love, love in their everyday lives. But that is an extraneous load for many elementary learners, which is why classroom management's really important. You always want a loud classroom when you're in a language classroom, but we want to manage that cognitive load for students where this is a lot for them. Another thing that can be an extraneous load or something that guns up the gears for students in a short class period is things like stuff they don't need, like if they have confusing slides that aren't very clear or well laid out, or if you have English instructions everywhere, we know from the binding work from Bill Van Patten that the more English you have in a world language classroom when you're trying to really get that French to be the focus of their cognitive load, it's actually very distracting for them. So even though it's like a brief relief and a brief respite of like, oh, thank God I can return to the stuff that I know, it is a load on the part of your brain that's trying to process this new language, which is why we find that more target language-oriented classrooms work better for the learner in the long term. However, don't worry, that's a whole nother episode of like, when should you use English? Um, or the L1 in general, that trust me, that's a whole other topic. So we're gonna keep this nice and tight and tidy today. But the more English that you use, the more you can really gum up the mental gears that your elementary learners are working with. The next thing we need to focus on is what's gonna help us, which is the germane load. If you've ever heard the term schema, this is it. Schema for a world language instructor is what we often refer to as the it's it's very much related, don't quote me on this, but this is how I see it. That it's related to the mental representation that we're trying to build in a language acquisition-focused classroom. So we are not looking for memorization and recall. We are looking to slowly weave the fabric of a schema in their brain. So, schema is just in general the mental filing cabinet, if you will, that organizes all of the information. So we want to fill that up and build it out. You cannot build it uh in a day, obviously. It takes time to slowly add pieces to the file. Um, so if you imagine the brain as a giant filing cabinet and there's a section of that brain that's working on French, you're a 10-year-old learner, you're pulling out the filing cabinet when they walk into class. You want a schema that allows them to pull on. Here's some vocabulary words that I know well, like colors and animals. But if you only have colors and animals and you don't have a nice thick file, or you're not building a current file on words I can use to express ideas, which would be what I call the fabric of language, things like verbs, actions, connector words, like conjunctions and um important prepositions, then they're not, they're only ever going to be able to give you nouns or understand nouns. So it's important to also focus on those like thick, heavy mental schema, that file that goes under how I put sentences together. So you I see it as like what's in my sentences is one file, how I put sentences together is another file, and we're trying to fill both at the same time. Um, a lot of things that elementary teachers get trapped into, and uh hint, hint, wink, wink, nod, nod. This is every world language teacher, usually, is that we spend a lot of time building the file of what's in my sentences instead of how do I put the sentence together. It's a real easy trap to get into because it's it's a lot easier for the teacher to fill that file than it is for the how do I make a sentence. So beware of that in your teaching. So the germane load is this magic of building this schema out, of slowly weaving a fabric of language together that your students can draw on whenever you're speaking to them in French or Spanish or Chinese, or you're signing an ASL, and when they're trying to draw on that same structure in order to produce anything. So, with this cognitive load, we need to be looking at how we can utilize what we know about cognitive load to make it work for a very short class period. So, here is a suggested outline for how you can work with this cognitive load in a 30-minute period. Let's say you start by getting all the kids in the door and getting them into something like a carpet circle. I would say that the first five minutes are really key to have as a ritual for class. The next section of class, maybe about 10 minutes, should be the input section. This is when you are, as the teacher, are providing the language. However, you choose to do that. There's so many ways. In an elementary class, one of the best ways is using a story, not always children's books, because those have sometimes advanced language, but if they have a lot of rhyme and wordplay, you're good. Um, you can also you can use a bunch of different things to do this. Um, I really, really love the sonrisas curriculum. Um, there's a previous podcast where we talked together, um, the founder and I, about all the different ways that sonrisas is set up really well for Spanish. It's built for elementary learners instead of being, you know, like adapted from a middle school. They started with elementary. So there's a lot of great stuff in there that follows this scheme, this I was about to say schema, that follows the schematics as well. The next thing you have after the first 10 to 15 minutes of class is a time to do the spiral. This is when you're drawing on elements from previous weeks' classes and putting them together and adding them into the new filing cabinet. It's uh, or adding them into the existing files, you're drawing on those to help create a new file in their filing cabinet. Um, it's often called like interweaving or um creating that mental representation, things like that. And then you're gonna do a really fun high-energy exit. This is a really great way to structure your lessons for any young learner between this age group of five and eleven, where you have, again, let's review what those four key points would be: the ritual, the input phase, the recycling phase. Some people would even call it a spiral, and then you have a fun, high-energy exit. Now, to make this work in your classroom, let's talk a little bit about the part of your question that really, really drew me in, Charlotte, which is that trap that a lot of us fall into of oh my gosh, I feel like I've been teaching the same thing forever, and I really just want to move on, but I don't feel like my students have mastered it. Let's talk about the word mastery in a world language classroom for a little bit. So mastery is actually not what we're looking for in world language. Whoa, hold up, wait a minute. I know. But language is a skill, it's not a subject. We can't use the word mastery like you can use in an English class or a history or science class. We are not looking for mastery of concepts. We are building mental representation. When you are building mental representation by exposing students to language at their level that they understand that they find really compelling, comprehensible input, right? You're not looking for them to master those terms. Mastering those terms, we found in SLA, if it's done really well, it can Take like three months, it can take six months, depending on the age of your learner, how good the exposure quality is for the input. I mean, that's where that number comes from, where you hear often of like they need to hear something 10 to 100 times for it to be quote unquote mastered. Mastery is not a concept you should be relying on in a world language classroom. What we are looking for instead, and how we know that we've met success, is that your students are moving steadily from a progression of recognition of phrases, understanding of phrases when you use them, to then finally production. So they're constantly moving on a continuum each time you learn a new phrase, or they are learning a new phrase, or acquiring is the better term. Let's say, for example, you are helping them to acquire the term green. Green. It's a great color. Verde. Wonderful. So you've used the word ver maybe like 15 times today in your elementary class because you've been pointing out who's wearing a green shirt, who likes the color green, who doesn't, um, what are some green things around the room that they can point to? You play a fun game where they do all that, yada yada yada. The work's so fun. They're having a blast. Let's move on. Next week, you revisit the term green, they probably recognize it. If they just like need a couple seconds to jog that memory, right? Like maybe you, I'm gonna put on my elementary teacher pants for a second. Like you're singing a song and you're, you know, you're playing like Bosho and Friends and all the stuff, like all the YouTube videos. Um my gosh, why can't I remember that key French guy that every French teacher uses with elementary learners? But you guys know what I'm talking about. That that one French channel that has all the colors and numbers and all the fun songs, you know what I'm talking about. Everybody uses it. Um so you play that color song and they're like, oh yeah, ver. And then they're running around the room, ver, ver, ver. I remember that color. That's great. That's not going to take very long. Like you might only need like three weeks for your students to, oh, okay, they've recognized the color ver from the from your first lesson. In the second week that you see them, that second lesson that you're working with colors, they are now able to understand, exciting. And then maybe even by the end of the lesson, they're like, I can produce this, no big deal. Ver, ver, ver. And then the next time that you see them in the hallway, you're like, hey, Chloe, what color is your t-shirt? And they'll be like, ver, so excited. They can produce it. The continuum of three months that we're talking about are things like Ilia, there is or there are. Things like cité, it was, that whole concept of it was. Like they'll be able to recognize it for a while. They'll sit on it for a little bit, and then they'll start to understand it when you use it a couple weeks later, and then in a few months, they'll be like, sete, sete ver, my shirt, cité ver yesterday. And that's they'll start getting really comfortable with using the terms it was after a few months. Now, as you can imagine with this continuum, this is not mastery. You cannot measure mastery from like, you know, a three-week to a six-week to a nine-week progression with just one word. That's never gonna work. What you are looking for in your elementary classes is how many words are in each current stage, and how can I keep moving the spiral upward? So it's a lot like you're constantly revisiting things, which is why we call it a spiral, um, and why actful uses that terminology a lot. And it's also why we love to use the word recycling for this, because in new settings and in new expectations, you are seeing the words, it was green. Like maybe you're talking about animals now, and you're saying, um, dinosaurs, it was green, you know, a long time ago. So they're seeing the phrases it was, and they're seeing colors again. Then you go into another unit where maybe you're talking about marine life and the ocean, and you can say things like, you know, it was green, um, the towel I brought to the ocean, or the seashore, and then it was green, the sea turtle that I saw there. So you're looking to use these same phrases like it was in new contexts with other recycled terms. So you might be thinking at this point, wow, that takes a lot of careful planning. Yeah, it does. The nice part about it though is that it replaces the intense amount of planning that elementary teachers usually do to try and keep their very repetitive and long ongoing units fresh for their students by like, let's add some new games. Oh my gosh, how can I make this worksheet fun? It's those two things are the same amount of work. So it just depends on what you want to focus your time on, is if I carefully plan how I'm gonna recycle terms, which is not easy, nobody is saying that. It can be the same amount of workload of I need to, my students are bored with this concept because we haven't moved on from a long for a long time, because I'm looking for mastery of the word sete and they don't have it yet. You're looking for a lot of ways to keep them with you, which are engagement tools and engagement strategies, instead of SLA-focused strategies, which don't have to be separate, you know, but like sometimes you do need to draw more on one than the other, living the teacher life that we do. So hopefully that helps to work with this mastery thing that gets floated around a lot in the education space. And while it works for other subjects, it does not work for us because we are a skill. We are not a subject. So, with all of this in mind, we've got some important things to watch out for when it comes to mastery. Think often, as we talked about, the spiral with how you present information. Let's look back at this uh framework we have for our lessons. We've got the routine for the first five minutes. This also reduces a lot of cognitive load because students know exactly what to expect. Next, you have the input where you're gonna be doing those new chunks, however you want to do it, and then leave room for the spiral. This allows your students to really move on. And then that's a whole 15 minutes of class that you don't have to constantly come up with new activities. You have to look and see what are the activities your students like and respond to, and just pull previous vocabulary into that. An important thing to think about too is how do you know when to move on? Like if mastery is not what we're going for, especially with Charlotte's question, like when can I move on? Here is a good rule for you. I love this 70% rule. Um, this is 100% my opinion. There is not a lot of research to back this up, but anecdotally, this is a good place to start. And I'm eager to look into this to see if there's some research to back it up. Do comment if you know what it is. But for me, if 70%, 75% of your students can recognize the word you're working with or the phrase you're working with, and they don't need a lot of reminders from you, this is a good place to move on because now you know, okay, I just need to revisit that term next week. So 75% are good, then you're ready to move on to the next concept. Now, let's talk about the specifics of the learner category that we're working with of young learners for an elementary class in a short time frame. Here are some things that work really well with some of the teachers I've worked with in the Practical Proficiency Network, which is my PD membership that is a one-stop shop for all your teaching essentials. In this program, I have the immense pleasure of meeting with elementary teachers or whichever teacher you are, but working with these elementary teachers, something that is consistent across programming that works well is harnessing what these students are really good at, which is that young learners are absolute masters of parroting. If you say something to them, they will parrot it back to you. If you give them a song, a rhyme, or a story, they are so excited and engaged in being a part of that story somehow, which in a language classroom is repeating things, um, filling in the gaps, singing a song, all of that. So that repetitive nature that students really love in that age group, especially with all the fun sounds, like they love rhyme, they love wordplay, they love songs. Use that. That is a great feature of your program that you can easily rely on. But one other big thing that works well for elementary teachers is if you only see your students once a week, which means like maybe if you have them for half a year, you might see them like a total of 20 or 30 times for these short pieces. Think of it like you're teaching an after-school activity where they also don't meet that often, like a play. So when I was in elementary school and I was doing plays, we would meet like twice a week for, you know, 12 weeks to put on some play at the end of the, um at the end of the theater season, whatever you want to call it. And it was so fun because even though if you have done theater at all, you know that everything about theater is extremely repetitive. You are doing the same songs and the same dances over and over again until it works. And you're slowly building together, you work from a line to a scene to a song to a dance to eventually it becomes a whole show, which is a really great way to also slowly build your schema. Even though you'll be working with the same things, the same words, the same language concepts, you can slowly add to it each time that you see them. One of my PPN members had this great idea working with her. She teaches English in Italy, and one of her elementary program big successes was that at the end of their program, they would always put on a play for the parents. Such a great idea because each week she's able to naturally revisit that language, rehearse fun songs and moments from that theater production, that play, and then put on the play at the end of the whatever the semester time that she had with students. So this works really well if you're in one of those programs where maybe you only see your kids 10 times. Put on some sort of end-of-the-class hurrah or production that they can get really excited about. This works really well with your younger learners. So if you're looking for something to be an anchor for the mental representation that you're building, or you want at least, like you know, that units might not work for this age group, but you want you need something to be your guiding North Star, right? Putting on a play is a great way to do that. If that's not your style, do a story. There are several short stories that work really well with the elementary brain. And you can definitely dip into the world of authentic children's books, but just be aware that a lot of that language in there is not going to be something that you're ever going to want to tease out with elementary learners, right? Like just let them parrot it, tell them what it means, and allow them to just enjoy the wordplay and the sounds rather than, you know, diving into all the crazy past subjunctives that happen in fairy tales. Whoa. All right. We've got a lot of ideas here, so we need to work this into a practical action step for you. Number one, if you are a short class period elementary teacher who is hanging in there and doing the most and probably working with multiple classes at the same time, my call to action to you is take a look at your class structure. If you only have 30 minutes with them, how are you spending the first and last five minutes of class? How much time are you spending on new material? Do a quick audit and just see what that looks like. Also keep in mind that a really good starting point for you is that you should be spending at least 15 minutes of every class period in the target language. That's your goal. Take a look at that and just evaluate what your average class period looks like and is it following those principles? If you don't yet have a ritual that you do every single class with your elementary learners, invest in one. Find one that you really like. Do that. Um, wow, you're really going to see that I am not familiar with elementary in this moment, but the that wonderful circled, like carpet talk thing that elementary teachers rock and it really helps their students stay anchored throughout the year, that's a great thing to start with. Um, we also have all of the exit strategies and all the exit tickets are a great thing to look at to just spend some time working with previous material. If you have listened to this podcast and thought to yourself, oh my gosh, I don't really recycle enough because nobody does, right? Like, does anybody? It's really hard. So if you're thinking to yourself, I don't recycle enough, here's a quick win for you that you can start tomorrow. Put some recycling in your exit ticket. Every day, pull some random words that you've been working with throughout the year, no matter what level your students are at, and just give them some little refreshers. Be like, hey, do you guys remember this word? Try and write a sentence with it. Or do you remember what this sentence means? Let's go over it again. Start to just slowly creep and recycle a few terms each day in your exit ticket and see if that helps. Y'all, I'm really excited for all of the info that we have in here. Thank you so much, Charlotte, for shouting out across the pond from the UK. I'm so happy that you're a listener and that you submitted this question. And I hope that it helps you as you're moving through your program this year. So thank you so much. If you have a question, I'm pretty sure it's uh part of the intro now, but if you have a question for the podcast, please submit it. They're great, they really help everybody, and I would love to answer it for you. Um, whenever you submit a question, I will answer it shortly and we'll be able to talk in depth about it. So it's a really great opportunity. Plus, it's super fun. Who doesn't love talking about SLA principles? I do. Y'all, thanks so much for joining me. This was a real joy. I love working with young learners, and I have so much respect for those of you that do. I'm on the other side where I prefer working with older learners. I like working with high schoolers, but the elementary programs are really, really special because you create the foundation for everything that's possible. So thank you for that. And thank you so much for being here today. I will see you on the next episode of the Practical Proficiency Podcast, where we chat more about cool stuff with SLA and how to make proficiency practical in your classroom. Ciao. Bye for now.