Glossary of English Language Teaching
From TEFL World Wiki
This is a glossary of general English Language Teaching terms. For a glossary of CALL specific terms, see here.
| academic year | This is the time spent at school during the year; in most countries this is from late August to the following June. |
| bilingual | able to speak 2 languages as a mother tongue |
| CALL | computer assisted language learning |
| Collocation | words in context |
| ELT | english language teaching |
| False Beginners | people who understand the basics of english but can't use it very well |
| False Friends | words from two different languages which look and sound the same but are not |
| Foreign Language | English: the language a student learns which is not their Mother Tongue in order to communicate with other English speakers. |
| Input | the language students are exposed to |
| Jargon | a hybrid language |
| Language Functions | the reason we use language; asking, asking, arguing, demanding and so on |
| Language Skills | the four basic ways we communicate with others: speaking, listening, reading, writing |
| Lexeme | a word |
| Lingua Franca | a common language amongst different peoples |
| Minimal Pairs | closely sounding words |
| Mother Tongue (MT) | your first language |
| Native Language | your mother tongue |
| Native Speaker | sb. who has learned a language from an early age |
| Near Native Speaker | almost a near native speaker but not quite |
| Non Native Speaker | someone who has learnt English as a Second Language |
| OHP | overhead projector |
| Pidgin | jargon |
| Role Play | acting out situations in class |
| Second Language | English: the language a student learns which is not their Mother Tongue in order to live in an English speaking country. |
| Skimming | reading for gist |
| Slang | special vocabulary or phraseology |
| Syllabus | overall teacher's plan for a class |
| Target Language | the language students are learning |
| TEFL | teaching english as a foreign language |
| TESL | teaching english as a second language |
| TESOL | teaching english to speakers of other languages |
| Total Immersion | floating in a sea of the target language |
| Utterance | a statement |
