TEFL Glossary

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/.