Applied Linguistics dictionary Part 19
minimum adequate speech vocabulary – the words “whatever!”, “I”, “was”, “like”, “yer” and “right!”
mode of discourse – fashion for discourse analysts
placeholder words – “Keep my seat till I get back, can you?”
reeferents – stoners
relevance theory – the idea that TEFL books can only have relevance to your lessons or be based on theory, not both
speech act theory – the idea that talking about it is better than doing anything
Tenor of Discourse (the) - the first and only discourse analysis opera
vague language- a common misspelling of “Vogue Language”
vague tags – unhelpful things to hang on your luggage, such as “Property of John”
vocabulary item – a must-have piece of vocab
word families – households in which all members are pedants
Word Frequency Counts- the aristocrats of corpus linguistics
Part 18 below, and parts 1 to 17 all together (only for the insane or insanely bored- but luckily plenty of TEFL teachers in those categories, boom boom) here.
Tags: ELT jargon, Humour
