Archive for the ‘TEFL spoofs’ Category

Acquisition facilitator- A factor such as needing a good TOEIC for a promotion that will make it easier for a language school to separate a student and his or her money

Affordances- Student decisions on whether a teacher with an MA in Sociolinguistics is worth the extra cash or not

Applied Linguistics- from the Latin for “practical use of your tongue”

Classroom pigeon- The kind of lucky classroom distractions that teachers who have started an explanation of a language point they don’t know end up hoping will come and save them

CLT- Communicative Language Teaching- The idea that by communicating with your students you can avoid having to teach them

Cognitive code learning theory- The idea that writing textbooks with everything written in code, such as converting all the letters to numbers, was the best way of stimulating students’ logical-mathematical learning style

Coherence- The part of a teacher’s classroom language that gets worse as their grading and speaking speed get better
 
Cohesion- The tendency of students to get attached to teachers and complain if the teacher changes, even when they know they are learning nothing in his or her classes

Comprehensible input- Teachers making their classroom language understandable by only using terms from the BASIC programming language

Just in case you came onto the site looking for something useful today (sorry, what can I say, it’s the weekend) if you click on the links you can get some non-alternative definitions too

Community Language Learning- The theory that students getting together at break time to bitch about British food and their teacher is the best way of drawing them together and increasing their motivation to learn

DoS- Director of Studies. Often confused with the similar word “dosser”

Flaps- Chairs with flaps rather than tables started as a Japanese S&M love hotel accesory, but has now become a standard part of the average language school. Influences that led to this change of purpose include: (a) Suggestopedia teachers patenting the use of comfortable chairs and, (b) Early Humanistic Language Teachers reading in a furniture catalogue that they “help you open up and show your vulnerabilities” and taking its meaning to be metaphorical

Pairwork- Getting students to work together. The expression “pairwork” is used to illustrate that double (”pair”) the effort (”work”) is needed by the teacher (to explain what he wants the students to do) and students (to understand what the hell is going on) as compared with just doing it as a whole class

Peer observations- When your DoS* tries to see what you are up to from outside your classroom without being seen by you

School Principal- In a school where the DoS* only has responsibility for academic matters, “School Principal” is often used as the title of the school’s business manager. Please note from the spelling of “principal” that the duties of this job should not be confused with “school manager with principles”, an outdated concept that died out in the early 90s

Silent Way (The)- A largely unsuccessful attempt to teach a language by spending the whole lesson standing at the front of the class with your arms crossed staring crossly at the students like your school teacher when he’d given up on yelling as a way of making the class shut up. As with its original inspiration, the only things a silent way teacher was allowed to say were “I can wait all day”, “It’s not my time you’re wasting, it’s your own” and “Whenever you’re ready, gentlemen”. Other even less successful attempts to turn school teacher disciplinary tricks into entire language learning methodologies include the Hysterical Hissy Fit Way, the Throwing the Board Eraser Way and the Throat-clearing Way.

Suggestopedia- This method of putting language learners into a hypnotic state through comfortable chairs and relaxing music was discredited in the late eighties when the teacher scripts were discovered to consist mainly of repeated phrases like “You will not get stressed about learning nothing” and “You can increase your TOEIC score by buying your teacher a drink”

See here for the full Alternative ELT Jargon Dictionary so far.

See if you can guess which one it is:

“For teachers who understandably rely on this skill of communication, it may be worth their while to consider the use of the varied styles that are available to them. To many, it will quite obvious that the monotonous tone does not achieve much success and leads to impatience, boredom, and irritability, both on the giving and receiving end. Such a tone is not result oriented. Rather, a more varied, creative and skilful approach to this art is recommended. This can be achieved through the use of interesting and atypical vocabulary, tone, and gestures. Analogies, similies, metaphors, rhyme, and rhytmn are also useful ways of (more…)

latest news is that Carson Young is thought almost certain to buy out the Birmingham Brasshouse Language Centre, so David Sullivan could be reduced to running a three classroom school with bored housewife teachers in Ipswich whose days of glory in the European English teaching market are long behind them.

Or am I confusing the big money excitement of English football with the big money excitement of English teaching again?