The complete guide to ELT Jargon Part 26

Chat bots- Teachers who are reduced to automatic expressions of “interest” by a student who keeps on going on and on

Cognitive strategies- Ways of avoiding having to think in class

Connectionism- Knowing enough people to get a university job

Constructed response- A student answer that has obviously been painfully assembled word by word from their mental bilingual dictionary

Dictogloss- Very shiny penises

Embedded words- Things to say to get yourself laid

Expectancy grammar- The look on the face of a teacher who is trying to elicit from a class who never speak out, or the look on students’ faces as they realise the teacher is sneakily working their way towards a grammar elicitation

Foreigner talk- Students talking about all foreigners in a disparaging way, having forgotten that the teacher who is standing right next to them is one too

Formal schema- A back stabbing teacher who hides it well with their polite language

Free talk- What students try to get from you after the lessons finished, even when the next class is waiting to come in

Global query- Gay TEFL teachers with wander lust, or random questions about random places from students who are convinced that foreign teachers will know everything about everywhere in the world

Information processing- The mushy mess that whatever you told your students turns into after going through their food-mixer brains

Input adjustment- Putting it back in the right place right after you do up your flies

Interlocotor- A half crazy Mexican

Learner centred- A class who have all turned round to look at someone who has let one rip

Learner-centred teaching- The teacher aiming all their comments at one student, e.g. one who actually laughs at their jokes or contributes to whole class speaking

Lexical selection- Choosing the “Mercedes of Japanese cars”

Linguistic adjustment- Suddenly realising that your tongue is hanging out and so pulling it back in

Listening skills clusters- Chocolate bars given to students about to do a textbook listening so that they actually stay awake

Local query- The campest person in your nearest pub

Mathematical Theory of Communication- The formula that explains why mathematicians will never be able to communicate normally in English however much they follow the study tips you give them

McGurk effect (the) – The gagging noise made by people who have learnt what haggis really is

Mental model- What lonely teachers in countries with strict laws of pornography have to imagine

Metacognitive- One of the robots from Transformers

Metacognitive strategies- Ways of defeating said robot

Multiple choice- The problem with new TEFLers who have no idea where they want to teach

Narrow listening- Having BBC Radio 2 permanently on

Negotiation of meaning- Trying to give students who are saying something incomprehensible an alternative, if entirely unconnected, thing to say

Orchestration- Using a baton to try and make choral drilling less cacophonous

Pacing- The caged bear routine of a teacher with too many classroom hours, too little time and money to join a gym, and too little to do in a class that is mainly pairwork

Parsing- RP for “overtaking”

Paused listening- What is going on in the brain of a student who has got stuck on one word and so doesn’t hear another word

Personal-response item- An activity that half your students hate and half love

Phonological decoding- Trying to read your TEFL teacher boyfriend’s diary that he has written entirely in phonemic script to work out if he is cheating on you or not

Pre-modification- The difficult skill of adjusting your language to exactly Pre-Intermediate level

Prosody- Short for “professional sodomy”

Reformulation- Using the same grammar explanation in almost every class

Rule-space technique (the) – Slow dancing with summer school students while keeping a regular 12 inches between you

Scavenging- Finding your next classroom activity in the scrap paper tray

Schema- The kind of teacher who is likely to reach management level in record time

Social constructivism- Building to keep people in work rather than from a desire to build anything attractive or useful, a popular strategy in East Asia

 Socioaffective strategies- The inverse relationship between how RP students’ accents are and their social skills, or being nice to your students just before an observed lesson, or being foppish in parties in the mistaken hope that it will make you interesting to people of the other sex

Sociocultural theory- The idea that TEFL teachers who fit in well with their new country do so because they had no social skills back home

Spacing- The distant and glazed look in the eyes of students who have just finished a long textbook listening

Speech rate- How much students have to pay for every word they are allowed to say in class

Standard exercises- Stretches that teachers can do in class without making their restlessness too obvious, such as rocking back and forth on the balls of their feet like a 1950s bobby

Top down processing- Only the managers getting computers

Top-down strategies- Students who go straight to the DoS to complain about anything and everything the minute they find out that they have failed the test or been caught cheating

 Universal worksheets- Ones that you use in absolutely every class, no matter what level or how vague their connection to the topic at hand

Should you want the real definitions- don’t ask me! I still do this because it makes reading jargon-laden books more interesting and in the hope that it will make the real definition stick, but in fact it usually just replaces the real meaning in my brain! Instead, all the real definitions for this little lot can be found in Teaching Second Language Listening by Tony Lynch. If my warning hasn’t put you off, you can find more alternative ELT jargon here and here

Tags: ELT jargon, Humour

This entry was posted on Friday, November 20th, 2009 at 1:35 am and is filed under Linguistics, applied linguistics and SLA, Listening. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.