BIELT- The British Institute of English Language Teaching, set up with the goals of establishing a framework of professional qualifications and a professional code of practice. It failed.
BULATS- EFL testing euphemism for “bollocks”
Cloze- (more…)
Consciousness-raising - Using obscure grammar questions as a path to enlightenment, similar to the Zen Buddhist use of koan such as “What is the sound of one hand clapping?”
Content-based approaches- Doing anything that keeps your students happy
Corpora- (more…)
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.
agreement- Verbs matching their pronouns, e.g. third person -s. If students make mistakes with this you can prompt them using this technical term, e.g. Student “My sister she get up at six and thirty” Teacher “Agreement” S “Sorry?” T “Your verb and pronoun disagree” “Eh?” “I said, your verb and the word before it are having a bit of a row” “What??” “If you don’t change that verb ending soon it’s going to come to blows, I’m telling you” “This teacher, he explain very bad” “Oh dear. Agreement!” etc.
ALT (Alien Language Teacher)- a native speaking assistant teacher who helps give lessons in Junior High schools etc. Not to be confused with ALF (Alien Language Friend)- someone who gives informal English conversation lessons in cafes.
approximants- Sounds that are as close as your students are ever going to get to native speaker pronunciation of English, e.g. a sound that is somewhere between an /r/, /l/ and /w/ but is at least usually identifiable as only one of those sounds.
assimilation- A form of connected speech where a sound in a word is modified by its neighbours, e.g. by being forced to buy a computer operated sprinkler because the sound next door has one
back-reference- The technical term for bitching about someone when they are not there, e.g. “Have you heard the news? It seems he’s one of them too!”
CALL (Computer assisted language learning- pronounced /kal/)- An intermediate step on the way to TELL (totally electronic language learning) and HAL (hologram assisted learning).
CMC (Computer-mediated communication)- When everything the teacher says goes through the students’ electronic dictionaries before it is accepted as true
complexity- How much of a complex students have about using things like conjuctions and pronouns for back-reference
compound sentence- A sentence with two or more clauses, usually long like the protective wall around the foreigner compounds teachers in Saudi live in
compounding- A way of forming words by combining two or more nouns or adjectives. Not to be confused with “pounding“, which is the technical term for when a student makes endless identical failed efforts at pronouncing a word until the teacher screams at them to stop
concord- Another name for agreement, such as agreeing to add an -e onto the end of the supersonic plane name just to make the French shut up for a minute
connected speech- When the student who always starts long monologues about random topics manages, by some fluke, to say something perfectly connected to what you want to do next in the lesson
connotation- The good, bad, humurous, old-fashioned etc. associations of words and expressions. The word “connotation” is derived from the French word “con”, which is a nice way of saying “bloody stupid”
fricatives- Sounds that are produced by friction. The word “fricative” is derived from the eupheumism “fricking”, and was originally used only to mean the insulting “raspberry” sound produced with your tongue
hybrid language learning- When strong students help weaker ones not just by explaining grammar but by contributing some of their genes with the use of modern classroom cloning technology (as yet only available at the British Council)
Juncture- The age of the rule of the Junker class in Germany, who were famous for pausing between each and every word to give them all a suitably strong Germanic emphasis
liaison- When an extra sound between a final vowel and the first sound of the next word passes notes back and forward between those two sounds until they get together for some really hot connected speech
non-voiced- Negative feedback to using games in class that doesn’t come out until the end-of-course feedback form because they always seem to be having fun
plosive sounds- The sounds students make just before they explode with frustration, e.g. the first four sounds in “bu bu bu bu..but I DID do my homework!!”
schema- A scheme or plot that is very complex and intelligent, hence the use of Latin to describe it
vowels- Sounds that are made without any significant obstruction or constriction. The word is derived by shortening the phrase “v(ery loose b)owels”
(Full list of the Alternative ELT Jargon Dictionary available on the Articles page above)