Dylan Viñales: Fluency, Trust, and the Problem with Testing

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode! What does it actually take for students to become fluent in a language? In this episode, Will Marks is joined by Dylan Viñales, Head of Spanish in an international school in Malaysia and co-creator of the Sentence Builder books. They explore what sits behind real fluency. Not just producing correct sentences, but building automatised language that students can retrieve and use with confidence. The conversation covers: how sentence builders support automatisation rather than memorisation why recycling and cognitive load are essential for long-term learning what it takes to move from structured support to genuine communication And at the centre of it all is one key idea. Trust. Trust in the classroom. Trust in the process. And trust in the language itself. Because when that trust breaks down, particularly through the way we assess languages, confidence follows. From GCSE listening to wider questions about testing, this is a clear-eyed look at the gap between how languages are taught and how they’re measured. 🔗 For links, transcripts and more: www.languagelabpodcast.co.uk ☕ Support the show: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/languagelabpodcast