TEFL Glossary

Scan reading or scanning is when we look through a text quickly to find specific information. For example, looking at a bus or train timetable, then looking down quickly until you find the name of the town you are travelling to, and then across the different times until you find the time of day you are interested in.

Schwa is a name given for the most common sound in English . The word derives from a Hebrew word for a diacritic indicating a neutral vowel sound.

Also referred to as L2A. It is the process by which a second language is acquired. It is a field of study in linguistics.

See main stress.

These are the authentic texts which have been adapted slightly for language teaching.

See modal verbs.

It is a sound usually classed as a consonant (in English), but not a true consonant because there is no complete closure or restriction stopping the flow of air. Also called an approximant  /r/, /l/, /w/ and /j/).

See adverb.

See adverbs

From Krashen's L2A theories and Terrell's Natural Approach, this is the idea that second language learners should be allowed to have a silent period when they first start learning. This means they are not forced to speak until they are ready.

The Silent Way teaching method takes its name from the fact that the teacher is supposed to be almost completely silent. The approach was developed by Egyptian educationalist Caleb Gattengo. The teacher is a facilitator rather than an instructor; s/he sets the students problems,  which they have to solve cooperatively by communicating with each other. There is a strong emphasis on pronunciation and coloured pronunciation charts. Cuisenaire rods are used to prompt students' language.

It is also called the Oral Approach. It is a language teaching approach developed in the mid 20th Century. See Unit 8 for detail.

See four skills.

Skim reading, or skimming is when we look through a text quickly just to get the gist - a general idea of what is being said. For example, imagine you were choosing a book to read in the airport shop shortly before going to catch a flight., you would probably skim through the 'blurbs' on the back covers of the books you are considering. 

See error.

The separate steps in a lesson are usually referred to as lesson stages.

See warmer.

See stative verbs.

They are also called state verbs. These are verbs that describe states rather than actions. They are often verbs which refer to thoughts, feeling and senses (e.g., love, understand, believe, see). These verbs are not usually used in continuous forms as they refer to something which is seen as permanent. When they are used in continuous form, the meaning is often slightly different (compare: I see the flowers with I'm seeing her tonight).

Most verbs are dynamic verbs; they describe physical actions and can be used in continuous forms.

It refers to the pattern of stresses on the syllables of a word. For example, important, disaster and commander all have the same stress pattern: oOo.

A string of letters is a set of letters which commonly occur together in a word. For example, 'string' is made up of two strings: str- (as in strike, stroke, stride, struck, etc.) and -ing. Awareness of strings helps develop reading skills.

The grammatical subject of a sentence is the noun, noun phrase or pronoun that comes before the verb. The subject is normally described as the agent (do-er) of an action:

All the children ran away.

He said I was stupid.

However, some verbs serve a linking function rather than expressing an action (see linking verbs). In sentences with linking verbs, something is said about the subject:

Belinda is a drug addict.

I became a teacher 10 years ago.

When the verb is in passive form, the subject of the sentence is the recipient of the action:

Vicki was bitten by a poisonous spider.

English demands that all sentences (except some exclamations, such as 'How nice!') have a subject. In some sentences, 'there' or 'it' acts as a dummy subject.

There are many reasons why I doubt what he says.

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/.