Linguistics
The study of word structure.
What is morphology?
A teaching approach focusing on communication through meaning-focused interaction, authentic texts, and learner needs.
What is Communicative Language Teaching (CLT)?
Getting information or language from students.
What is eliciting?
A grammatical choice where the subject receives the action rather than performing it, often to make the agent less important.
What is the passive voice?
A scoring guide for performance.
What is a rubric?
The rise and fall of pitch across speech that can signal meaning, attitude, or discourse function.
What is intonation?
A lesson structure that moves from teacher-led input to guided and then freer student practice, sometimes criticized for lack of learner autonomy.
What is a PPP lesson framework?
A question to check learners’ understanding of meaning.
What’s a concept check question?
The relationship between words that have opposite meanings, such as hot and cold.
What is antonymy?
Assessment for learning.
What’s formative assessment?
A sound change where adjacent sounds become more similar, as in input → imput.
What is assimilation?
Learners discover grammar rules themselves through examples rather than being explicitly told.
What is an inductive approach?
Learners share information to complete a task.
What’s a jigsaw activity?
Words or phrases that link ideas within and between sentences?
What are cohesive devices (or linking words)?
Assessment of learning.
What’s summative assessment?
Ship / Sheep.
What’s an example of minimal pairs?
The hypothesis that language is acquired through exposure to comprehensible input slightly above the learner’s current level.
What is Krashen’s Input Hypothesis (i+1)?
Support given to help learners perform a task.
What is scaffolding?
A grammatical construction where an element of a sentence is moved to the front for emphasis or contrast
What is fronting (or inversion)?
The effect of tests on teaching and learning.
What’s washback?
The study of how context influences meaning.
What is pragmatics?
An approach emphasizing learner discovery, minimal teacher talk, and the use of coloured rods, developed by Caleb Gattegno.
What is the Silent Way?
When a teacher reformulates a learner’s incorrect utterance into a correct one without explicitly pointing out the error.
What is a recast?
A lexical process where a new word is formed by combining parts of two words, such as brunch or smog.
What is blending?
A statistical measure used to determine whether individual test items effectively differentiate between high-performing and low-performing candidates.
What is item discrimination (or discrimination index)?