TEFL Glossary

Grading your language means using language appropriate to your students' level. When you are explaining a new word or phrase, it is easy to accidentally use another piece of unfamiliar vocabulary. You then need to explain that, and in doing so you might introduce a third unfamiliar term! Instead, you should try to explain the vocabulary item without using other words or grammatical structures that the students don't already know.

See warmer.

An approach that prioritises the needs, interests, and learning styles of students in the educational process.

Specific statements that describe what students are expected to achieve by the end of a lesson.

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A learning platform is any online information system used for teaching. This maybe for exclusively online courses, such as this one, or to support traditional teaching in schools, universities, etc.

It is a student's preferred way of learning, e.g, visual, auditory, kinaesthetic. It also refers to the conditions in which an individual is most likely to learn effectively.

Lexical approaches to language teaching emphasise the importance of vocabulary in language learning. A lexical syllabus is organised according to the vocabulary that is to be taught rather than the grammar or the functions. A large proportion of the language we produce seems to be memorised 'chunks of language', rather than original creations generated through combining our grammatical and lexical knowledge. Examples are the _____er, the _________er (as in the bigger, the better), you must be joking, to cut a long story short.

These 'pre-fabricated chunks' are given various names such as lexical phrases, holophrases, gambits and lexicalised stems. What they are called does not really matter, but it is very useful for the language teacher to recognise and teach these chunks.

It is concerned with the relationship that exists between lexical items in a text such as words and phrases. Lexical cohesion includes two types, reiteration and collocation.