Enacting the Work of Language Instruction - Vol 1

Enacting the Work of Language Instruction: High-Leverage Teaching Practices, Vol. 1 presents an approach to teacher education and professional development that emphasizes carefully deconstructing fundamental instructional practices that are complex and often not visible through observation, definition, or brief explanation. Its goal is to assist teachers in learning how to enact specific practices, referred to as high-leverage teaching practices, deemed essential to foreign language teaching and situated in theory and research. 

Six practices are presented: 

• Facilitating Target Language Comprehensibility
• Building a Classroom Discourse Community
• Guiding Learners to Interpret and Discuss Authentic Texts
• Focusing on Form in a Dialogic Context Through PACE
• Focusing on Cultural Products, Practices, and Perspectives in a Dialogic Context
• Providing Oral Corrective Feedback to Improve Learner Performance 

Unique features of the book include the deconstruction of each practice, activities for rehearsing the practices, rubrics for assessing performance, tools to assist teachers in enacting the practices, and a discussion of how each practice relates to larger educational issues.

Eileen W. Glisan is Professor Emeritus at Indiana University of Pennsylvania, where she coordinated the Spanish Education K-12 Program for more than 30 years. President of ACTFL in 2010, she is co-author of several leading texts, including The Integrated Performance Assessment: Twenty Years and Counting (2023), two volumes of Enacting the Work of Language Teaching: High-Leverage Teaching Practices (2017 and 2025), and Teacher’s Handbook: Contextualized Language Instruction (fifth edition in 2016). She received the 1996 Anthony Papalia Award for Excellence in Teacher Education.

Richard Donato (Ph.D., Linguistics, University of Delaware) is professor emeri- tus in the Department of Teaching, Learning, and Leading in the School of Education at the University of Pittsburgh. His research on foreign language edu- cation earned him the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages/ Modern Language Journal Paul Pimsleur award (1997 and 2006), the Northeast Conference Freeman Award (2004), and the French Institute of Washington Award (2003). In 2016, he won the University of Pittsburgh’s Provost award for doctoral student research mentoring. Eileen W. Glisan is Professor Emeritus at Indiana University of Pennsylvania, where she coordinated the Spanish Education K-12 Program for more than 30 years. President of ACTFL in 2010, she is co-author of several leading texts, including The Integrated Performance Assessment: Twenty Years and Counting (2023), two volumes of Enacting the Work of Language Teaching: High-Leverage Teaching Practices (2017 and 2025), and Teacher’s Handbook: Contextualized Language Instruction (fifth edition in 2016). She received the 1996 Anthony Papalia Award for Excellence in Teacher Education.