TEFL Glossary

Also called a dependent clause, a subordinating clause acts to 'finish a thought' in a sentence. However, it is not a full sentence on its own  - it only makes sense in combination with the main clause.

Example: I shouted at him because I was I annoyed.

If you are good, I'll make you a pie.

It is a conjunction used at the start of a subordinate clause.

A morpheme (a meaningful word part consisting of a letter or set of letters)  e.g., '-ing''-tion' or '-ly',  added to the end of a base word to form another word, usually a different grammatical category in the same word family.

E.g., happy, happily, happiness.

Georgi Lozanov, a Bulgarian educator and psychiatrist, pioneered Suggestopedia as a language teaching method in the 1970s. Lozanov was influenced both by Soviet psychology and yoga. He argued that in order to learn, students need to feel totally relaxed. The classroom should be furnished with comfortable armchairs and be pleasantly decorated and lit. Teaching should be accompanied by the playing of classical music. The teacher plays an authoritarian (but not aggressive) role so that the teacher-student relationship is similar to a parent-child relationship.

It is a word which refers to a category of things (also called a hypernym) e.g., fruit, animal. The members of the category are hyponyms, e.g., oak is a hyponym of tree.

Part of a word containing a vowel sound and pronounced as a 'unit.' If you beat out the rhythm of a word, the number of beats will show the number of syllables in that word. For example, 'cat' has one syllable. 'car-pen-ter' has three syllables. As indicated above, in English a syllable normally contains a vowel, however there are three consonants which can act as syllabic consonants: /m/ /n/ and /l/ as in bottom, button and bottle. Some speakers move straight into these sounds without articulating an intervening vowel. Syllabic consonants are transcribed with a dot under the phonetic symbol, so you may see, for example, the word freckle transcribed as /'frekəl/ or /'frekl̩/.

1.  The actual language you are teaching in a specific lesson (e.g., a particular tense used in a particular way, or a set of vocabulary.)

2. 'Target language' is also used more generally to refer to the foreign or second language students are learning, in our case, English.

TBLL, also referred to as Task-Based Language Teaching (TBLT) and Task Based Instruction (TBI), is a teaching approach which focuses on the use of authentic language rather than teaching specific language items. Students are asked to do meaningful tasks using the target language, such as conducting an interview, making a phone call or buying tickets.

See  Task-Based Language Learning.

See Task-Based Language Learning.