According to the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages, reaching advanced language proficiency can lead to cognitive, psychological, employment, and societal benefits. When you choose and study material for your Advanced Topics course (or as a language learner out in the world in general), you may be asking yourself: How do I learn from real world language content that isn’t made for learning? 

This guide aims to answer that question. Below, we provide a menu of pointers and activities, arranged so that you can move from just going over authentic materials to internalizing, using, reviewing, and expanding on them. 

These are just a starting point. You can change, repeat, skip, or add your own activities as necessary. Still, whatever activities or topics you choose, the core steps of independent learning will almost always be getting authentic input, studying and using that input, and then effectively reviewing it all.