Inttoduction

Over the years, through workshops, conferences, social media and conversations with teachers, I have noticed that the very same questions about EPI keep coming back. They are important questions because they concern what ultimately matters most: how we move from supported performance to independence, from knowledge to fluency, and from classroom practice to genuine communication!

In this post, I address six of the questions I am asked most frequently:

1. How do you teach writing in EPI, and how do you move from micro-writing to extended writing?
2. How do we move students from sentence builders and scaffolding to genuinely independent speaking and writing?
3. How do we get students to speak spontaneously rather than simply reproducing memorised sentences?
4. What is the best way to correct errors without damaging fluency, confidence or motivation?
5. How do we recycle language effectively across units so that students actually remember it months later?
6. How do I embed culture in an EPI curriculum?

Although these may appear to be six separate questions, they are actually connected by one fundamental principle: we cannot expect learners to perform complex language tasks successfully unless we systematically develop and practise the processes that underpin them. Whether we are talking about writing, speaking, error correction, retrieval, recycling or culture, the objective is ultimately the same: to help learners develop a repertoire of language that is durable, rapidly retrievable, flexible and usable in real communication!

And, as always, the journey from input to independence matters just as much as the destination!

1. How do you teach writing in EPI, and how do you move from micro-writing to extended writing?

In EPI, writing is taught as a process, rather than simply practised as a product. Too often, students are given a title, a few bullet points and perhaps a vocabulary sheet and are expected to produce 90 or 150 words. Yet extended writing requires the learner to perform numerous demanding processes simultaneously. L2 writing research has long conceptualised writing as the coordination of multiple cognitive and linguistic processes, including planning, formulation, lexical retrieval and monitoring (Kellogg, 1996; Kormos, 2012; Manchón, 2011). If those processes have not been adequately trained, simply asking students to write more extended pieces will not necessarily make them better writers!

The model I use identifies eight processes involved in successful writing: understanding the task, generating ideas, retrieving language, building sentences, applying grammar, organising and linking ideas, checking whilst writing, and improving after writing. Each needs to be explicitly developed.

This is where micro-writing is particularly useful. Instead of practising all eight processes simultaneously, we can design short tasks which foreground one or two:

• Understanding the task: 1. give students three possible responses to an exam bullet point and ask which actually addresses it and why. 2. Give them a title such as The pros and cons of driving a car and a set of sentences some of which are pertinent and some of which aren’t. The task: crossing out the irrelevant ones, or ranking them in descending order of relevance
• Generating ideas: 1. give a prompt such as What did you do last weekend? and allow 45 seconds to generate five possible ideas before writing anything. 2. Give them the same prompt and sentence stems to complete.
• Retrieving language: 1. Give five English chunks or visual prompts and ask students to retrieve the target-language equivalents from memory. 2. Stage a No snakes no ladders with mini whiteboards
• Building sentences: 1. provide three familiar chunks and challenge students to combine them into one well-formed sentence. 2. Give them a sentence and then ask them to extend them with prompts such as when, how, where, who with
• Applying grammar: 1.Give a sentence in the present and ask students to rewrite it accurately in the past; 2. Give them incorrect sentence to rewrite accurately
• Organising and linking ideas: 1. Give three short sentences and ask students to connect them into a coherent mini-paragraph. 2. Stage a jigsaw reading task
• Checking whilst writing: 1. Students write three sentences but pause after each to run through a short checking routine, for example checking the verb, agreement and word order. 2. Students write one sentence at a time, pausing after each to check meaning, accuracy and cohesion, identify and repair any problems, then continue writing.
• Improving after writing: 1. Give students their own four-sentence text back and ask them to upgrade two sentences by adding detail, complexity or greater lexical precision. 2. Ask them to keep a personalised list of their recurrent mistakes and ask them to use it before handing it a written piece.

These individual processes sit within five broader principles which shape how I approach writing instruction in EPI.

1. Write little and often. Replace occasional marathon writing sessions with frequent, low-stakes writing opportunities. Writing fluency is built through regular retrieval, sentence-building, manipulation and quick-response tasks rather than through constantly producing extended pieces. A student who writes four or five carefully focused sentences several times a week may get far more useful writing practice than one who produces a long piece every few weeks! This emphasis on repeated retrieval and increasingly fluent access to language is consistent with research on retrieval practice and skill development (DeKeyser, 2007; Nakata, 2017).

2. Train the processes, not just the product. Successful writing depends on processes such as idea generation, lexical retrieval, grammatical and orthographic encoding, sentence assembly and monitoring. These processes need to be practised explicitly and systematically, rather than assuming that they will somehow develop simply because students write longer texts (Kellogg, 1996; Kormos, 2012).

3. Prime before you write. Activate the language before asking students to write. Listening, reading, retrieval and speaking tasks can reactivate relevant vocabulary, chunks, structures and ideas, making them more readily accessible when students begin writing. Research on pre-task planning and pre-learning similarly suggests that making relevant linguistic resources more accessible can support subsequent L2 production (Ellis, 2005; Webb, 2009). We should not repeatedly send learners to the blank page linguistically “cold”!

4. Build automaticity through rapid response. Activities such as mini-whiteboard work, retrieval tasks, translation sprints, Do Nows and plenaries can develop greater speed and fluency in accessing language. Skill-acquisition accounts of L2 learning emphasise the importance of extensive practice in moving from effortful processing towards increasingly rapid and automatised performance (DeKeyser, 2007; Segalowitz, 2010). Knowing a word or structure is not enough if retrieving it consumes so much cognitive capacity that little remains for constructing and monitoring the sentence!

5. Use extended writing sparingly but purposefully. Extended writing certainly has a place, but primarily to integrate, demonstrate and diagnose writing skills, not as the dominant form of writing practice. If the underlying processes are weak, repeatedly asking students to produce 90 or 150 words simply gives them repeated practice at struggling with those same processes.

So how do we eventually get to extended writing?

The transition involves progressively integrating the processes that have previously been practised in smaller combinations. Students move from individual sentences to sentence expansion and manipulation, from sentences to linked sentence chains, from sentence chains to short paragraphs, and eventually from paragraphs to extended texts. At the same time, scaffolding is gradually faded and retrieval demands increase.

This is important motivationally too! A struggling learner confronted with a blank page and “Write 150 words” can experience failure before writing has even begun. Micro-writing creates frequent, achievable successes, whilst allowing us to diagnose exactly where the problem lies.

The principle is simple: write little and often, train the processes, prime before writing, build automaticity, progressively integrate the processes and only then expect learners to orchestrate them independently in extended writing!

2. How do we move students from sentence builders and scaffolding to genuinely independent speaking and writing?

One criticism occasionally levelled at EPI is that sentence builders create dependency. They can, but only if they are used incorrectly. A sentence builder is a temporary scaffold, not the destination. The purpose of scaffolding is ultimately to make itself redundant!

At the beginning of an instructional sequence, students need substantial support because the language is unfamiliar and retrieval from long-term memory is not yet possible. Sentence builders reduce cognitive load, make useful patterns transparent and allow learners to experience successful comprehension and production very early on. This is compatible with cognitive-load accounts of instruction, which emphasise the importance of reducing unnecessary demands on limited working-memory resources during initial learning (Sweller, Ayres & Kalyuga, 2011).

However, there is a crucial stage between using a sentence builder and dispensing with it: retrieval practice.This is where, in my experience, quite a few teachers who have adopted the MARS EARS cycle move too quickly. They spend considerable time modelling the language and carrying out receptive-processing activities, but not nearly enough time on the repeated retrieval required to make that language readily available without the scaffold. Then, when the sentence builder disappears, students struggle, and the conclusion is sometimes that they have become “dependent” on it. Often, the real problem is simply that retrieval has not been practised sufficiently! Research on retrieval practice shows that effortful retrieval can strengthen subsequent retention more effectively than additional exposure alone (Karpicke & Roediger, 2008), whilst L2 research has demonstrated benefits from repeated retrieval for vocabulary learning (Nakata, 2017).

Fading should therefore be gradual. Students might initially work with the complete sentence builder, then with sections covered, then with increasingly minimal prompts, then perhaps with English cues or images, and eventually with no linguistic support whatsoever. Activities such as delayed copying, sentence reconstruction, translation, retrieval grids, oral retrieval from visual cues and writing from memory can progressively increase retrieval strength.

However, independence requires more than recalling the original sentences. Students must also manipulate and recombine the language. Change the subject. Change the tense. Add a reason. Substitute an adjective. Combine two familiar structures. Respond to an unexpected question. Use a familiar chunk in an unfamiliar context.The criterion for removing scaffolding should therefore not be time, as in “we have used this sentence builder for three lessons”. It should be evidence that learners can retrieve and manipulate the target language successfully.

This is why the retrieval work in MARS EARS matters so much. Repeated retrieval, spaced over time and under increasingly demanding conditions, is what converts supported performance into increasingly autonomous performance (Nakata, 2015, 2017).

The journey is essentially:

scaffolded processing → retrieval → faded retrieval → manipulation → recombination → autonomous use

The goal was never independence from the language in the sentence builder. We want that language firmly embedded in long-term memory! What we want is independence from the sentence builder itself.

3. How do we get students to speak spontaneously rather than simply reproducing memorised sentences?

First, we need to rethink what “spontaneous speaking” actually means. Spontaneity does not mean generating language from nowhere. Fluent speakers draw constantly on familiar lexical chunks, collocations, syntactic patterns and communicative routines stored in long-term memory. Research on formulaic language has repeatedly highlighted the role played by prefabricated sequences in fluent language production (Pawley & Syder, 1983; Wray, 2002; Wood, 2010). You cannot spontaneously retrieve language which you have never acquired!

The real objective is therefore to develop a sufficiently large and automatised repertoire which learners can retrieve, adapt and recombine rapidly in response to an unpredictable communicative need. Research into L2 fluency similarly stresses the importance of automaticity and speed of access to linguistic knowledge (Segalowitz, 2010).

This is why speaking instruction, like writing instruction, needs to be process-based. Simply telling students to “have a conversation” does not train the processes which successful conversation requires.

I typically build towards communicative interaction progressively. Early on, chunking aloud helps establish accurate and fluent articulatory routines. For example, students can repeatedly produce a difficult phrase such as je voudrais aller or ich würde gerne as a single phonological unit rather than assembling it word by word. Research on formulaic sequences provides a strong rationale for building readily accessible multiword units, and intervention research has found benefits of explicit formulaic-sequence instruction for aspects of oral fluency.

We then need substantial oral and written interactional retrieval practice. Students might see a visual cue and retrieve a question, hear a question and rapidly retrieve an appropriate response, or complete a written interaction in which each answer determines the next question. The aim is to make high-frequency interactional language increasingly accessible and rapidly retrievable.

Next come mini role-plays. These are very short exchanges with a limited communicative objective. Students might buy a train ticket, decline an invitation politely, arrange when and where to meet, order something in a café or complain about a hotel room. These provide genuine interaction without overwhelming working memory.

We then progressively increase unpredictability through communicative tasks such as information gaps, spot-the-difference activities, problem-solving, surveys, decision-making tasks or conversations in which students do not know in advance exactly what their partner will say. Task-based research has long emphasised the importance of meaning-focused interaction and increasingly demanding conditions for L2 production (Ellis, 2003; Skehan, 1998).

Throughout this sequence, however, we must train the micro-skills of speaking: asking and answering questions, turn-taking, initiating and closing an interaction, reacting, hesitating naturally, requesting clarification, repairing communication, circumlocuting, agreeing and disagreeing, using fillers and buying oneself processing time.

These behaviours also need routinisation. For example, repeated two-minute conversations with changing partners can require students to use expressions equivalent to “Really?”, “Why?”, “What about you?”, clarification requests and follow-up questions until these interactional routines become increasingly automatic.

This is why I do not accept the opposition between memorisation and spontaneity. Memorisation of useful language is necessary but insufficient. The progression should be:

chunking → retrieval → interactional retrieval → mini role-plays → increasingly unpredictable communication

At the same time, we systematically train and routinise the micro-skills which hold conversation together.

Spontaneity is not where speaking instruction begins. It is what well-sequenced, process-based speaking instruction gradually makes possible!

4. What is the best way to correct errors without damaging fluency, confidence or motivation?

The first question I ask is: what is the purpose of the activity?

Not every error needs correcting, and certainly not every error needs correcting immediately. Error correction should be driven by the learning objective and by where students are in the instructional sequence. Research on corrective feedback strongly supports its potential value for L2 development, whilst also showing that its effects depend on factors including feedback type and instructional context (Li, 2010; Lyster & Saito, 2010; Lyster, Saito & Sato, 2013).

During highly controlled work, particularly when students are consolidating a new pattern, accuracy matters greatly. Errors which become repeatedly rehearsed risk becoming entrenched. At this stage, relatively immediate feedback can therefore be useful, particularly when it directs attention to the precise feature students are trying to acquire. Indeed, Lyster and Saito’s classroom meta-analysis found significant and durable benefits of oral corrective feedback, although the effects varied according to the feedback provided.

However, the situation changes when the primary objective is fluency.If a learner is trying to sustain an interaction and we interrupt every few seconds to correct gender, adjective agreement or a verb ending, we force attention away from meaning and towards form. We increase cognitive load, disrupt the flow of communication and potentially make the learner increasingly reluctant to speak.

So correction needs to be selective, purposeful and timed intelligently!

I tend to prioritise errors which impede communication, relate directly to recently taught high-value language, occur repeatedly, or are likely to become habitual. Many other errors can be left temporarily untouched.

Feedback can also be delayed. During a speaking task, for example, the teacher can note recurring errors and address them afterwards with the whole class. This preserves communicative flow whilst still creating an opportunity for learning.

The same principle applies to writing. Covering a student’s page in corrections is rarely productive. Working memory and attention are limited. A learner is far more likely to benefit from focused feedback on two or three recurring or important problems than from twenty corrections which they barely process. Research on written corrective feedback similarly highlights the importance of what learners actually do with the feedback they receive, rather than viewing teacher correction as an end in itself (Ferris, 2010; Storch & Wigglesworth, 2010).

Most importantly, correction should generate further processing. Simply showing students the correct form is often insufficient. Ask them to retrieve it again, discriminate between correct and incorrect versions, reconstruct the sentence or use the corrected pattern in another context.

Error correction should therefore not be conceived as the teacher’s attempt to eliminate every mistake. Errors are inevitable in language development.

The objective is to decide which errors matter now, when attention should be drawn to them, and what students should subsequently do with that feedback.

Correction is most effective when it becomes another opportunity for learning, rather than merely an indication that something was wrong!

5. How do we recycle language effectively across units so that students actually remember it months later?

One of the biggest problems in language curricula is that we confuse having taught something with students having learnt it. A structure appears in Unit 2, students practise it, take a test and everybody moves on. By Unit 6, much of it has disappeared.

That is not surprising. Forgetting is normal. A curriculum designed for durable learning must therefore engineer systematic recycling across units. Research on distributed practice and L2 vocabulary learning supports revisiting material across spaced encounters rather than concentrating all practice into a single period (Nakata, 2015; Nakata, Suzuki & He, 2023).

The first mechanism is interleaving. Rather than practising only the language belonging to the current unit, deliberately mix previous material with current learning. If students are studying holidays, for example, a retrieval task might combine where I went with previously learnt language relating to weather, transport, food, opinions and descriptions of people. Students now have to select the appropriate language rather than simply retrieve items from a predictable single set. L2 research has found benefits of interleaving for the longer-term retention of grammatical distinctions and foreign-language verb conjugation (Nakata & Suzuki, 2019; Pan et al., 2019).

Do Now tasks are ideal for this! The first five minutes of a lesson can retrieve language not merely from yesterday but from last week, last month and the previous term. An Exit Ticket can similarly include one item from today’s learning and one or two strategically selected items from earlier units. The important principle here is not the label attached to the activity, but the use of spaced, effortful retrieval.

We also need cumulative receptive and productive tasks. A listening text in Unit 5 should not contain only Unit 5 language. It can deliberately incorporate high-value material from Units 1 to 4. The same applies to reading. Productively, cumulative speaking and writing tasks should require students to mobilise language from several previous contexts rather than merely reproduce the latest unit.

Curriculum sequencing itself can facilitate this. Semantic proximity between adjacent units creates natural opportunities for recycling. A unit on daily routine can lead naturally into school life; school into free time; free time into health; holidays into travel, weather and accommodation. Previous language remains communicatively useful rather than disappearing because the textbook has suddenly moved to an unrelated topic.

Other useful techniques include planned carry-over language, deliberately identifying high-value chunks and structures which must recur in subsequent units; cumulative retrieval grids; interleaved translation; cumulative quizzes; old-language/new-context activities; and requiring students to reuse previously learnt structures with new vocabulary.

The important point is that recycling cannot be left to chance. When planning Unit 6, ask not only “What new language am I teaching?” but also “What from Units 1 to 5 am I deliberately bringing back, and in what form?”

A retrieval-driven curriculum therefore behaves less like a sequence of sealed boxes and more like an expanding network. New learning is constantly connected to old learning!

Ultimately, the test of recycling is not whether students recognise something when we show it to them. It is whether, months later, they can retrieve and deploy it rapidly without being told where it originally came from.

6. How do I embed culture in an EPI curriculum?

When people discuss embedding culture in MFL, the conversation often begins with content: festivals, food, monuments, famous people, films, music, literature and historical events. All of these can enrich a curriculum. However, if the overarching aim of EPI is to develop language fluency and successful communication, I would start somewhere else.

Hence, my first question would be:What culture-related issues could impede successful communication or interaction in the target-language country or countries?

Culture is not simply something we know about. Culture influences what people do with language! This is central to the notion of intercultural communicative competence, in which successful language use involves not merely linguistic knowledge but understanding how language, relationships, social practices and cultural meanings interact (Byram, 1997; Kramsch, 1993).

Take forms of address. A student may know the grammar of tu and vous, du and Sie, or tú and usted, but successful interaction requires more than grammar. Who uses which form with whom? Under what circumstances? Who normally initiates the move towards greater informality? A linguistically accurate choice can still be socially inappropriate. Research into interlanguage pragmatics has repeatedly demonstrated that grammatical competence alone does not guarantee pragmatically appropriate L2 performance (Kasper & Rose, 2002; Taguchi, 2015).

The same applies to requests. A learner may translate “Give me a coffee” perfectly accurately at sentence level but fail to understand how requests are conventionally softened in the target culture. So, when teaching ordering in a café, I would model not merely the vocabulary for drinks but culturally plausible openings, requests, responses, thanks and leave-taking.

Consider greetings. Teaching bonjour or hola as lexical equivalents of “hello” is insufficient. When are they used? Does one greet staff when entering a small shop? What happens when joining a group? When might handshakes, kisses or simply verbal greetings be expected? The language and the cultural script belong together.

The same principle applies to disagreement. Students can learn je ne suis pas d’accord, but authentic interaction requires sensitivity to how directly disagreement is normally expressed in different contexts. We can give students several ways of disagreeing, ask them to decide which might be appropriate in different situations and relationships, and then use them in mini-dialogues and role-plays.

Or take invitations and refusals. Students can role-play inviting someone out, but the cultural learning lies partly in how one accepts, declines, gives a reason, proposes an alternative and closes the exchange without sounding abrupt.

Culture can therefore be embedded naturally into EPI sequences through models, listening texts, dialogues, interactional retrieval, role-plays and communicative tasks. If students are learning requests, teach culturally appropriate requesting. If they are learning opinions, teach culturally plausible agreement and disagreement. If they are learning transactional language, teach the interactional routines surrounding the transaction.

Of course, literature, history, music, geography, festivals and the diversity of target-language societies remain valuable. But cultural learning should not become a succession of interesting facts detached from what students can actually do with the language.

From an EPI perspective, one of its most important purposes is to develop pragmatic and intercultural competence, helping learners understand not merely what to say, but what to say, to whom, when, how and why!

Because grammatical accuracy alone does not guarantee successful communication. You can produce a perfectly grammatical sentence and still get the interaction completely wrong!

Selected bibliography

Byram, M. (1997). Teaching and Assessing Intercultural Communicative Competence. Multilingual Matters.

DeKeyser, R. M. (Ed.). (2007). Practice in a Second Language: Perspectives from Applied Linguistics and Cognitive Psychology. Cambridge University Press.

Ellis, R. (2003). Task-Based Language Learning and Teaching. Oxford University Press.

Ellis, R. (Ed.). (2005). Planning and Task Performance in a Second Language. John Benjamins.

Ferris, D. R. (2010). Second language writing research and written corrective feedback in SLA: Intersections and practical applications. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 32(2), 181–201.

Karpicke, J. D., & Roediger, H. L. (2008). The critical importance of retrieval for learning. Science, 319, 966–968.

Kasper, G., & Rose, K. R. (2002). Pragmatic Development in a Second Language. Blackwell.

Kellogg, R. T. (1996). A model of working memory in writing. In C. M. Levy & S. Ransdell (Eds.), The Science of Writing. Lawrence Erlbaum.

Kormos, J. (2012). The role of individual differences in L2 writing. Journal of Second Language Writing, 21(4), 390–403.

Kramsch, C. (1993). Context and Culture in Language Teaching. Oxford University Press.

Li, S. (2010). The effectiveness of corrective feedback in SLA: A meta-analysis. Language Learning, 60(2), 309–365.

Lyster, R., & Saito, K. (2010). Oral feedback in classroom SLA: A meta-analysis. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 32(2), 265–302.

Lyster, R., Saito, K., & Sato, M. (2013). Oral corrective feedback in second language classrooms. Language Teaching, 46(1), 1–40.

Manchón, R. M. (Ed.). (2011). Learning-to-Write and Writing-to-Learn in an Additional Language. John Benjamins.

Nakata, T. (2015). Effects of expanding and equal spacing on second language vocabulary learning. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 37(4), 677–711.

X. (2023). Costs and benefits of spacing for second language vocabulary learning. Language Learning, 73(3), 799–834.

Pawley, A., & Syder, F. H. (1983). Two puzzles for linguistic theory: Nativelike selection and nativelike fluency. In J. C. Richards & R. W. Schmidt (Eds.), Language and Communication. Longman.

Segalowitz, N. (2010). Cognitive Bases of Second Language Fluency. Routledge.

Skehan, P. (1998). A Cognitive Approach to Language Learning. Oxford University Press.

Storch, N., & Wigglesworth, G. (2010). Learners’ processing, uptake, and retention of corrective feedback on writing. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 32(2), 303–334.

Taguchi, N. (2015). “Contextually” speaking: A survey of pragmatic learning abroad, in class, and online. System, 48, 3–20.

Webb, S. (2009). The effects of pre-learning vocabulary on reading comprehension and writing. Canadian Modern Language Review, 65(3), 441–470.

Wood, D. (2010). Formulaic Language and Second Language Speech Fluency. Continuum.