The Alternative TEFL jargon dictionary Part 21
Monophthong – only one pair of pants
Note-taking – a way of stopping budding classroom romances
Paragraphing – going beyond graphs
Phoneme – the smallest sound in the language, made by making the opening of your mouth tiny as if you are sucking a very thin straw
Post-reading tasks – “Ask me at least 5 more vocab questions about the text” (Please! We’ve got six minutes left and I’ve run out of material!)
Prefix -
before losing your tackle
Pre-reading tasks – “Open your books” and “Find the text on page 32″
Process writing – spending so much time thinking about how you are going to write something that you get zero down on paper by the due date
Productive skills – ones that make you money
Proof-reading – students deliberately giving their workbook or graded reader rabbit ears so it looks like they have been using it
Question tag – what Surrealists attach to their check in baggage
Reading for gist – not to be confused with reading for gism
Reading for specific information – a euphemism for just looking at the pictures
Receptive skill – the skills of being a receptionist , or being able to tune the radio
Scanning – the first stage of “writing” an article for homework for the average Southern European or East Asian student
Secondary stress – caused by teaching teenagers
Sentence stress – students getting more and more het up as they realise that they don’t know how to finish what they are saying
Skimming – like a stone bouncing on a lake, being able to get through the whole class whilst only having to explain three or four pieces of language, due to “concentrating on skills”
Subskill – being able to survive covering someone’s class but not being so good as to show the usual teacher up, or used to describe a student without any actual skills in English
Synonyms – names your mother calls you when you’ve been naughty
Topic sentence – one about nuts and/ or chocolate
Unstressed – the brief period between finishing your CELTA and being offered your first teaching job
Word stress – anxiety caused by vocabulary in the text that the teacher knows they can’t explain
If that ain’t enough for you, you’ll be wanting to take a look at Part 20.
Tags: ELT jargon, Humour
January 16th, 2009 at 9:19 am
conditionals – a word that apparently collocates with ‘weather’ to describe, er, the weather.
January 16th, 2009 at 9:20 am
lexis – posh word for vocabulary.
January 16th, 2009 at 9:21 am
lexical development – the act of handing out a word list.
January 16th, 2009 at 9:23 am
L1 interference – a term that can be used as a way of blaming students for just about anything that happens in the language classroom.
January 16th, 2009 at 9:26 am
thesis statement – usually the final sentence of the essay introduction, the aim of which is to allow the student to utterly confuse the teacher about what they’re actually writing about.
January 17th, 2009 at 2:08 pm
Wow, I was amazed when I saw this post had 5 comments. I was even more impressed when I saw they were all by one man!
January 19th, 2009 at 6:29 am
Sorry, should have bun dled them all together. Every time I pressed submit I had another flash of inspiration.