# ELT Terminology Glossary

| Term | Meaning |
|------|---------|
| Aim (main / subsidiary / personal / stage) | What learners will achieve; supporting aims; the teacher's own development goal; the purpose of a stage |
| Anticipated problems | Likely difficulties with meaning, form, pronunciation or tasks, and planned solutions |
| Aspect | Simple, continuous (progressive), perfect, perfect continuous: how an action is viewed in time |
| Authentic material | Texts made for real communication, not for learners |
| Back-chaining | Drilling a long phrase from the end backwards |
| Board plan | Planned layout of the board |
| CCQ | Concept-checking question: checks understanding of meaning |
| Cloze | Text with words removed at regular intervals |
| Collocation | Words that naturally go together (make a decision, heavy rain) |
| Controlled / freer practice | Practice with limited, predictable language vs practice where learners choose their language |
| Delayed correction | Correcting errors after an activity rather than during it |
| Drilling | Repetition of a model (choral, individual, substitution) |
| Elicit | Draw information or language from learners rather than tell them |
| Feedback (content / language) | Discussing task results; correcting language |
| Gist | The general meaning of a text |
| Guided discovery | Learners work out rules from examples, guided by questions |
| ICQ | Instruction-checking question |
| Interaction patterns | T-Ss, S-S, Ss-Ss, individual |
| L1 / L2 | First language / second (target) language |
| Lead-in | Opening stage that creates interest and context |
| Lexis / lexical set | Vocabulary / a group of words on one topic |
| Meaning, form, pronunciation (MFP) | The three parts of language analysis |
| Minimal pair | Two words differing in one sound (ship/sheep) |
| Monitoring | Listening to and observing learners during tasks |
| Nominate | Choose a particular learner to answer |
| Phoneme | A distinctive sound in a language; shown in phonemic script /ʃ/ |
| PPP / TTT / TBL | Presentation-practice-production / test-teach-test / task-based learning |
| Realia | Real objects brought into class |
| Recast | Teacher reformulates the learner's utterance correctly |
| Scanning / skimming | Reading for specific information / for gist |
| Schwa | /ə/, the most common unstressed vowel |
| Sentence (nuclear) stress | The main stress that shows the key information |
| STT / TTT | Student talking time / teacher talking time |
| Sub-skills | Parts of a skill: for reading, gist, detail, inference, deducing meaning |
| Target language (TL) | The language item(s) the lesson focuses on |
| Timeline | Diagram showing the time reference of a tense |
| Weak form | Unstressed pronunciation of function words (/tə/ for to) |
| Word stress | Which syllable of a word is stressed (phoTOgraphy) |