Learning a Language Was Never About the Language

In two weeks, our school is closing for a golf tournament across the street. That has shifted my whole end-of-year timeline. I’m giving final exams and collecting final projects this week, which has prompted me to reflect on my year a little earlier than I expected to.

There’s relief in not having to actively prep students for May exams. But there’s also something heavier. A sense of grief, maybe, for a year that pushed me as an educator in ways I didn’t see coming.

AI is changing the educational landscape, and I’m still catching up.

For most of my career, I’ve loved teaching Spanish because it isn’t just a subject. It’s a skill you carry with you. You take it out when you travel, when you meet someone who speaks Spanish, when you watch a film or listen to music in another language. It’s something you acquire and use for the rest of your life.

But in the age of AI, with the constant temptation to offload language production to a machine, I’ve found myself genuinely struggling with what the future of language learning looks like. How do I draw students back in? Why does this matter?

I’ve had this conversation with colleagues. With my wife. Way too often with myself.

And I keep coming back to the same answer. It isn’t about ordering coffee in Madrid. It isn’t about watching Roma without subtitles. It’s about gaining an understanding of people and their way of living. That was my a-ha moment. Learning a language is valuable because of the connection it gives you. And while students may push back on why they should bother when AI can do the heavy lifting, they are almost always interested in the people. In how others live. In perspectives that aren’t their own.

So what can I do about it?

In my reading on literacy, I keep running into the phrase “knowledge-rich curriculum.” When I try to define it for myself, I land somewhere between Tom Sherrington and E.D. Hirsch. For me, a knowledge-rich curriculum is one that specifies the content students should learn (facts, vocabulary, concepts, cultural references, literary works) and sequences it coherently across years so that knowledge accumulates and compounds. It treats skills like reading comprehension, critical thinking, and communication not as generic abilities to be drilled, but as the products of deep, organized knowledge in a specific domain (Sherrington, 2018; Hirsch, 2006).

What strikes me, the more I read, is that AI doesn’t make this kind of curriculum less important. It makes it more important. In a recent paper called The Memory Paradox, Barbara Oakley, Terrence Sejnowski, and their colleagues argue that when we outsource thinking to tools like ChatGPT, our brains learn where the answer can be found, not how it’s actually generated (Oakley et al., 2025). We end up with a pointer instead of a schema. And without an internal schema, we can’t really evaluate what the AI gives us. We just accept it. Which means the students who will use AI well are the ones with deep knowledge already in their heads. AI widens the gap between those who know things and those who don’t.

In language teaching, much of what I do is skills-based. How do we speak? What grammar do we use? What’s the cleanest way to sound polished? All of that still matters to me. I want my students sounding as authentic as possible, because that’s what gives them the confidence to take risks.

The problem is that students now need more buy-in to get there than they used to. They want to know why. And honestly, fair enough. If a language model can spit out a fully-formed German article in seconds, why spend years perfecting a skill a machine can perform instantly?

So this year, after fighting that battle for too long, I leaned harder into cultural topics than I ever have. I talked more about Picasso. About food. About family structures. The language was still there, but it was the vehicle, not the destination. With my juniors, my most successful classes were the ones built around cultural and historical content. They had to create and analyze in Spanish, which meant they were asking me how to present an idea, not how to conjugate a verb. The content led, and the students followed. That’s where the energy was.

There’s actually a famous study from 1988 that captures what I was seeing. Donna Recht and Lauren Leslie gave middle schoolers a passage about a baseball game and tested their comprehension. What they found was that prior knowledge of baseball mattered more than reading ability. Weaker readers who knew baseball outperformed stronger readers who didn’t (Recht & Leslie, 1988). The cognitive scientist Daniel Willingham has spent years arguing that this is how comprehension works in general. As he puts it, teaching content is teaching reading. The same logic, I think, applies to a Spanish classroom. A student with cultural and historical knowledge of the Hispanic world reads, listens, and engages with Spanish at a different level than a student who has only been drilled on grammar. Not that I am throwing grammar away. But I want them to want to know the grammar. The content is what makes the language come alive.

So what now?

I think next year, I need to give content-rich curriculum the seat at the table I’ve been denying it. I need to lead with cultural topics instead of tacking them on at the end. I need to make them relevant and interesting, which means actually knowing my students and what they care about. Some of that is simple. Food, music, art. I shied away from these in recent years and dove into niche topics instead, and I think that was a mistake. Niche topics don’t mean anything until students have the background knowledge to understand the daily life of the people behind the language.

And maybe, if students get genuinely interested in the people and the life, they’ll want to connect more deeply. In which case, the language stops being the thing I have to convince them to learn. It becomes the thing they reach for on their own.

References

Hirsch, E.D. (2006). The Knowledge Deficit: Closing the Shocking Education Gap for American Children. Houghton Mifflin.

Oakley, B., Sejnowski, T., et al. (2025). The Memory Paradox: Why Our Brains Need Knowledge in an Age of AI. arXiv preprint. https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.11015

Recht, D.R., & Leslie, L. (1988). Effect of prior knowledge on good and poor readers’ memory of text. Journal of Educational Psychology, 80(1), 16–20.

Sherrington, T. (2018, June 6). What is a knowledge-rich curriculum? Principle and practice. teacherhead.com. https://teacherhead.com/2018/06/06/what-is-a-knowledge-rich-curriculum-principle-and-practice/

Willingham, D.T. (2017). The Reading Mind: A Cognitive Approach to Understanding How the Mind Reads. Jossey-Bass.