Language for Professional Life

Understanding “ Teaching”

What it means to teach:"life in the

classroom.”
 Understanding the Learning Process

Understanding the learning

process: the procedures and
strategies SS use to acquire new
information.
Without ‘Motivation’, learning will
not occur.
• Background to language teaching
• Presentation Techniques, Approaches And
Introductory Activities
• Activity-based learning: A way of learning by doing
activities. The rules of language are looked at either
after the activity or not at all.
• Contextualise: To put new language into a situation
that shows what it means, e.g. The music in the disco
was very loud. the scene, context.
• Elicit: When a teacher asks careful questions to get
students to give an answer.
• Ice-breaker: An introductory activity that
a teacher uses at the start of a new
course so that students can get to know
each other.

• Introductory activity: An activity which

takes place at the beginning of a lesson.
Introductory activities often include
warmers.
• Lexical Approach: A way of analyzing language that
is based on lexical items such as words, multi-word
units, collocations and fixed expressions rather than
grammatical structures. Some ELT books and
materials organize their syllabuses around the
Lexical Approach.
• Mime:
• Presentation: introduce new language.
• Presentation, Practice and Production (PPP):
T presents the language, gets SS to practice it
in exercises or other controlled practice
activities.
• Structural Approach: A way of teaching
which uses a syllabus based on
grammatical structures. The order that
the language is presented is usually
based on how difficult it is thought to be.
• Task-based Learning (TBL): A way of teaching in
which the teacher gives students meaningful tasks
to do. The T may ask SS to think about the
language they have used to do the tasks, but the
main focus for students is on the task itself. Project
work is task-based.
• Teaching strategy: The procedure or approach used
by a teacher in the classroom, e.g. a teacher may
choose to give thinking time to students before
they speak.
• Test-teach-test: A way of teaching new
language. The teacher asks students to do a
task without giving them any help, to see how
well they know a certain piece of language
(this is the first test). The teacher then
presents the new language to the students
(teach), then asks the students to do another
task using the new language correctly (this is
the second test).
• Total Physical Response (TPR): A way of teaching in
which the teacher presents language items as
instructions and the students have to do exactly
what the teacher tells them, e.g. Open the window!
Stand up! This method is very meaningful and good
for beginners when they start to learn a new
language, as they have a silent period and can
make fast progress.
• Active role, passive role: When students think
about their own learning and what their own
needs are and try to help themselves learn more,
they are taking an active role. A passive role is the
opposite of an active role.
• Classroom Management: The strategies used by a
teacher to organise the classroom and the
learners, such as seating arrangements, different
types of activities, teacher roles, interaction
patterns.
• Closed pairs: When students do pairwork with the
person sitting next to them and no one else listens.
See open pairs.
• Discipline noun + verb: The way a teacher keeps
control of students in the classroom.

• Dominate verb, dominant adj: To have a very

strong influence over what happens. If a particular
student is dominant in class, then other students
get less chance to participate actively. If a teacher
dominates, the lesson is teacher-centred.
• Energy levels: The feeling in a classroom. If
students are interested and working hard, then the
energy levels are high; if SS are bored or tired then
the energy levels are low.
• Get students’ attention: To make SS listen to the
teacher, possibly after they have been doing group
or pairwork.
• Grade (language): To use language that is the
correct level for the students and is not too difficult.
See graded reader.
• Interaction patterns: The ways in which students
work together in class, such as open class,
pairwork, group work and individual work.
• Involvement: Taking part in an activity, being
involved in it.

• Mixed ability, mixed level: The different levels of

language or ability of students studying in the same
class.
• One-to-one: A teaching situation which involves only one
teacher and one student.
• Open class: When the teacher leads the class in an activity
and each student is paying attention to what is happening.
When students respond, they do so in front of everyone in
the class.
• Open pairs: In open pairs, one pair does a pairwork activity
in front of the class. This technique is useful for showing
how to do an activity and/or for focusing on accuracy. See
closed pairs.
• Passive role: see active role.
• Rapport, build rapport: The relationship between
the teacher and students. Teachers try to build or
create a good rapport or relationship with their
students.
• Routine: Something which is done regularly such as
a teacher setting writing homework every Friday.
Teachers try to develop some routine habits in the
classroom, e.g. always asking students to record
new words with their meaning and an example
sentence.
• Seating arrangement: The way the students sit in
the classroom, e.g. in rows, in a circle around the
teacher, in groups around different tables.
• Seating plan: A plan of where the students should
sit in the classroom.
• Teacher role: The way a teacher chooses to manage
the classroom, e.g. a teacher can choose to take a
controlling role, giving directions or instructions at
the front of the class or to take a less controlling
role, monitoring students as they work.
• Teaching space: The areas in the classroom that can
be used for teaching, e.g. the board, the walls, the
desks, the open floor.
• acceptability Usually contrasted with
grammatically, e.g. ‘The man thrown the ball kicked
it’ is grammatical and acceptable whereas the
sentence ‘The man kicked the ball kicked it’ is
grammatical (has the same form) but is not
acceptable.
• acquisition A term used for language learning
which is unconscious, i.e. without deliberate
attention to rules. Some writers contrast acquisition
with learning, i.e. conscious, deliberate learning.
See monitor.
• active vocabulary Words, phrases, etc., which a
learner can use in speech and writing. Cf. passive
vocabulary.
• analytic syllabus A syllabus which provides the
student with authentic texts from which he makes
his own analysis. Structural considerations are
secondary to the use to which he puts the language.
See synthetic syllabus.
• anomie A feeling of disorientation often
experienced by immigrants through being unable to
identify either with the users of the home language
or with the host community.
• approximative systems A learner’s transitional knowledge
at any point moving towards his competence in the target
language; cf. interlanguage.

• aspect With tense and mood, one of the grammatical

categories of the verb. Refers to the way in which the
action of the verb is experienced or regarded, mainly used
to distinguish forms like ‘I break’ from forms like ‘I am
breaking’ and ‘I have broken’.

• autonomous learning Learning in which the learner

becomes independent of the teacher, working with his own
momentum.
• bilingual education/schooling This is where two
languages are used in the school and some, at least,
of the content teaching, e.g. Mathematics,
Geography, is in the less familiar one.
• bilingualism Having command of two languages.
Until recently the implication was that both
languages were spoken with equal proficiency.
• cloze test procedure Consists of a written
passage in which, after the first, introductory
paragraph, every fifth (or sixth…or twelfth)
word is left out for the student to supply.
Used to measure the readability of texts,
reading and listening comprehension, and
general proficiency in English.
• code (1) The inventory of signs and rules in a
system. Refers to systems like traffic-lights and
visual communications or to the formal aspects of
human language. (2) In sociolinguistics. See
elaborated code and restricted code, code switching
The usually unconscious movement from one
language to another in the course of one utterance
or even sentence. Also the changing of style or
dialect within an utterance in one language.
• cognitive code learning Emphasises the conscious
learning of new items by deliberate attention to
‘rules’ rather than by the stimulus-response training
of behaviourism.
• collocation The tendency for words to occur
predictably with others; e.g. solve/problem. Fixed
collations are very predictable; e.g. hearth and
home; hop, skip and jump. See Idiom.
• common core Administratively the central part of a
course, programme or syllabus which must be
followed by everyone. The elements of the
language essential to any language teaching
programme.
• content word A word with a full lexical meaning of
its own, i.e. nouns, main verbs, adjectives and most
adverbs. Cf. function words.
• core linguistics Phonology, syntax, lexis and
semantics which are seen as the central
concerns of linguistics, contrasted with
linguistic studies which are related to other
disciplines, e.g. psychology, sociology.
• false beginners/faux débutants Students
starting elementary language courses but
having had previous experience or study of
the language.
• individualisation An approach to teaching in which the
specific needs of each learner are catered for so that
he proceeds at his own rate, in his own way, with his
own materials—used in contrast with lockstep’
teaching.
• information gap The situation in which different parts
of a piece of information are known to different people
who, therefore, need to communicate with each other
to gain complete information and therefore fill the gap.
• lock-step A pattern of teaching in which all pupils move
forward at approximately the same rate, carrying out
the same tasks and procedures at the same time—like
soldiers marching together. See individualisation.
• look and say An approach to teaching initial
reading by concentrating on the general shape
of the word and not on reconstructing it from
the sound-letter correspondence.
• macro-sociolinguistics The study of the use of
language at the level of the speech
community, the nation, etc., concerned with
language planning, language policy, for
example. Cf.
• micro-sociolinguistics:The study of the use of
language at the level of interaction between
individuals, typically concerned with such matters
as the level of formality used, and the linguistic
matters of relative status, personal attitude, etc.
• .
• micro-teaching A procedure used in teacher
training wherein a small part of a lesson is taught
to a small number of ‘pupils’ for a short length of
time. ‘Pupils’ are often peers of the students who
may or may not be assigned roles.
• Micro-teaching is often video-recorded allowing
the teachers to watch themselves, and in the
classic form of micro-teaching there is a revise and
reteach phase as well
• passive vocabulary The vocabulary which a student
is able to understand as distinct from what he or
she is able to use. ‘Receptive’ is often preferred, as
the operation of understanding is not a passive
activity.
• pedagogical grammar A grammar of a language
modified so that it is suitable for effective teaching;
this may be based on an adaptation of a descriptive
grammar, or on an analysis of the natural order in
which a learner or learners acquire items in a
foreign language.
• psycholinguistics The study of all psychological
issues relating to language, particularly first and
second language learning, the relationship between
language and concept formation, and language
disorders.