Glossary of Language Teaching Terms and Ideas

I recently updated my book Teach and Learn: Reflections on Communicative Language Teaching  and posted it on Kindle. To take a look, please click here. 

It's also available as an inexpensive paperback.

Here is the glossary from the original.


• Accuracy: Producing language with few errors.
• Achievement test: A test to measure what students have learned or achieved from a program of study; should be part of every language program and be specific to the goals and objectives of a specific language course. These tests must be flexible to respond to the particular goals and needs of the students in a language program.
• Activate: The phase in a lesson where students have the opportunity to practice language forms. See “controlled practice”, “guided practice”, and “free practice”.
• Active listening: A technique whereby the listener repeats (often in other words) what the speaker has said to demonstrate his or her understanding. Active listening is an especially useful alternative to directly correcting a student error.
• Active vocabulary: Vocabulary that students actually use in speaking and writing.
• Active: Related to student engagement and participation. For example, listening is perceived to be a passive skill, but is actually active because it involves students in decoding meaning.
• Alphabet: A complete standardized set of letters – basic written symbols – each of which roughly represents a phoneme of a spoken language, either as it exists now or as it may have been in the past. English uses the Roman or Latin alphabet, which consists of vowels and consonants.
o Vowel: A sound in spoken language characterized by an open configuration of the voice tract so that there is no build-up of air pressure above the vocal chords. The Roman vowels include the letters “a”, “e”, “i”, “o”, “u” and sometimes “y”. In all languages, vowels form the nucleus of a syllable. A vowel also completes a syllable.
o Semivowel: A sound that is much like the vowel, but is not the key (nuclear) sound in a syllable. Examples: the opening sounds in the words “yet” and “wet”.

o Consonant: An alphabetic character which represents a sound created by a constriction or closure at one or more points along the vocal tract.
Consonants form the onset or end of a syllable, or both.
• Aptitude: The rate at which a student can learn a language, based on raw talent. Aptitude does not seem to be related to attitude; a gifted student can have a poor attitude.
• Attitude: A complex mental state involving beliefs, feelings, values and dispositions to act in certain ways. Attitude affects a student’s ability to learn, but is unrelated to aptitude.
• Audiolingualism: A form of language learning based on behaviourist psychology. It stresses the following: listening and speaking before reading and writing; activities such as dialogues and drills, formation of good habits and automatic language use through much repetition; use of target language only in the classroom.
• Audio-visual aids: Teaching aids such as audio, video, overhead projection, posters, and various other displays of pictures and graphics.
• Aural: Related to listening.
• Authentic text: Natural or real teaching material; often this material is taken from newspapers, magazines, radio, TV or podcasts.
• Automaticity: A learner’s ability to recover a word automatically, without straining to fetch it from memory.
• Behavioural psychology: Also called behaviourism, the belief that learning should be based on psychological study of observable and measurable psychology only; psychological theory based on stimulus-response influenced audiolingualism.
• Bottom-up information processing: Students learn partially through bottom-up information processing, or processing based on information present in the language presented. For example, in reading bottom-up processing involves understanding letters, words, and sentence structure rather than making use of the students’ previous knowledge.
• Brainstorming: A group activity where students freely contribute their ideas to a topic to generate ideas.
• Burn-out: Fatigue usually based on either the stress of overwork or boredom with the same task.
• Chomsky, Noam: The ideas of the great American linguistic theorist Noam Chomsky can be very abstract, while communicative language teaching is wildly practical. Chomsky’s theories of knowledge of language and language acquisition relate as much to the study of human nature as to language teaching. As Steven Pinker explains,
Chomsky’s claim that…all humans speak a single language is based on the discovery that the same symbol-manipulating machinery, without exception, underlies the world’s languages. Linguists have long known that the basic design features of language are found everywhere… A common grammatical code, neutral between production and comprehension, allows speakers to produce any linguistic message they can understand, and vice versa. Words have stable meanings, linked to them by arbitrary convention….Languages can convey meanings that are abstract and remote in time or space from the speaker, (and) linguistic forms are infinite in number.
Please see “Chomsky’s Black Box”.
• Chorus: Speaking together as a group; used in choral speaking and jazz chants.
• Classroom climate: Environment created in the classroom by factors such as the physical environment and also the interrelationship between the teacher and the students, and among the students.
• Classroom management: The management of classroom processes such as haw the teacher sets up the classroom and organizes teaching and learning to facilitate instruction. Includes classroom procedures, groupings, how instructions for activities are given, and management of student behaviour.
• Cloze: A technique usually used to assess students’ reading comprehension. Cloze can also be used as a practice activity. Teacher blanks out certain words from a written text and students fill in the missing words based on their understanding from context.
• Collocation: The way words are often used together. For example, “do the dishes” and “do homework”, but “make the bed” and “make noise”.
• Colloquialism: A word or phrase used in conversation – usually in small regions of the English-speaking world – but not in formal speech or writing: “Like, this dude came onto her real bad.”
• Communicative Competence: The role of language learning is to achieve communicative competence. Communicative competence has four parts, which we call language competencies.
1. Grammatical competence is how well a person has learned that features and rules of the language. This includes vocabulary, pronunciation, and sentence formation. The main question is: How well does a person understand English grammar?
2. Sociolinguistic competence is how well a person speaks and is understood in various social contexts. This depends on factors such as status of those speaking to each other, the purpose of the interaction, and the expectations of the interaction. The main question is: how socially acceptable is the person’s use of English in different settings?
3. Discourse competence is how well a person can combine grammatical forms and meanings to achieve different types (genres) of speaking or writing. The main question is: How well does one properly combine all the languages elements to speak or write in English?
4. Strategic competence is how well the person uses both verbal forms and non-verbal communication to compensate for lack of knowledge in the other three competencies. The main question is: Can a person find ways to communicate when he or she is lacking some knowledge of English?
• Communicative Language Teaching: Communicative language teaching (CLT) is an approach to foreign or second language learning which emphasizes that the goal of language learning is communicative competence. The communicative approach has been developed particularly by British applied linguists as a reaction away from grammar-based approaches such as the aural-oral (audio-lingual) approach. Teaching materials used with a communicative approach teach the language needed to express and understand different kinds of functions, such as requesting, describing, expressing likes and dislikes, etc. Also, they emphasize the processes of communication, such as using language appropriately in different types of situations; using language to perform different kinds of tasks, e.g. to solve puzzles, to get information, etc.; using language for social interaction with other people.
• Competence learning model: Especially when we take specialized courses, learning seems to take place in four stages. We begin with unconscious incompetence: we do not know how much we do not know. Once we begin our course of studies, we become consciously incompetent: we know how much we do not know. From there we proceed to conscious competence: we have functional knowledge and can perform competently, but we have to think about what we are doing. Finally, after we have had enough experience, we become unconsciously competent: we know it and we can do it, and we do not much have to think about it. This model applies to a great deal of language learning, to TEFL training and to many other areas of study.
• Comprehensible input: Language that is understandable to learners.
• Content words: Words that carry meaning; usually nouns, verbs and sometimes adjectives and adverbs.
• Context clues: Clues used when guessing word meanings; clues that provide students with meaning or comprehension based on the environment in which a word is found.
• Contrastive analysis: Comparing two languages to predict where learning will be facilitated and hindered.
• Controlled practice: Practice of language forms in a way that is controlled by the teacher.
• Creative construction hypothesis: Hypothesis in language acquisition which states that learners gradually develop their own rule systems for language.
• Culture: The sum of the beliefs, attitudes, behaviours, habits and customs of a group of people.
• Deductive teaching: Also known as deduction, from the verb “to deduce”; a teaching technique in which the teacher presents language rules and the students then practice those rules in activities. Deductive teaching is usually based on grammar-based methodology and proceeds from generalizations about the language to specifics. (See “Inductive teaching”.)
• Delayed copying: The teacher writes a short familiar sentence on the board, gives students time to look at it, erases it, and then they see if they can write it.
• Descriptive grammar: Grammar that is described in terms of what people actually say or write, rather than what grammar books say tho grammar of the language should be. See “prescriptive grammar”.
• Diagnostic test: A test to diagnose or discover what language students know and what they need to develop to improve their language abilities; may be used before a course of study and combined with placement test.
• Dictation: A technique in which the teacher reads a short passage out loud and students write down what the teacher reads; the teacher reads phrases slowly, giving students time to write what they hear; the technique is used for practice as well as testing.
• Discourse: See “communicative competence”.
• Facilitator: A concept related to a teacher’s approach to interaction with students. Particularly in communicative classrooms, teachers tend to work in partnership with students to develop their language skills. A teacher who is a facilitator tends to be more student-centred and less dominant in the classroom than in other approaches. The facilitator may also take the role of mentor or coach rather than director.
• Feedback: Reporting back or giving information back, usually to the teacher; feedback can be verbal, written or nonverbal in the form of facial expressions, gestures, behaviours; teachers can use feedback to discover whether a student understands, is learning, and likes an activity.
• Fluency: Natural, normal, native-like speech characterized by appropriate pauses, intonation, stress, register, word choice, interjections and interruptions.
• Form-focused instruction: The teaching of specific language content (lexis, structure, phonology). See “language content”.
• Free practice: Practice activities that involve progressively less control by the teacher.
• Function words: Also known as form words, empty words, structure or structural words and grammar words; these words connect content words grammatically; function words have little or no meaning by themselves. Examples include articles, prepositions and conjunctions.
• Functional syllabus: Syllabus based on communicative acts such as making introductions, making requests, expressing opinions, requesting information, refusing, apologising, giving advice, persuading; this type of syllabus is often used in communicative language teaching.
• Gesture: A facial or body movement that communicates meaning; examples include a smile, a frown, a shrug, a shake or no of the head. Gestures often accompany verbal communication.
• Grammar: See “descriptive grammar” and “prescriptive grammar”. Also, see “communicative competence”.
• Graded reader: Reading material that has been simplified for language students. The readers are usually graded according to difficulty of grammar, vocabulary, or amount of information presented.
• Grammar translation: A method of language teaching characterized by translation and the study of grammar rules. Involves presentation of grammatical rules, vocabulary lists, and translation. Emphasizes reading rather than communicative competence.
• Grammatical syllabus: A syllabus based on the grammar or structure of a language; often part of the grammar translation method.
• Guided practice: Intermediate step in teaching between controlled and free practice activities; there is still some teacher guidance at this stage.
• Idiom: A group of words whose meaning is different from the meanings of the individual words: “She let the cat out of the bag” or “He was caught red-handed.”
• Inductive teaching: Also known as induction, from the verb “to induce”; a facilitative, student-centred teaching technique where the students discover language rules through extensive use of the language and exposure to many examples. This is the preferred technique in communicative language teaching. (See “ Deductive teaching”.)
• Input hypothesis: Hypothesis that states that learners learn language through exposure to language that is just beyond their level of comprehension. See “Krashen, Stephen”.
• Interference: A phenomenon in language learning where the first language interferes with learning the target or foreign language.
• Interlanguage: The language a learner uses before mastering the foreign language; it may contain features of the first language and the target language as well as non-standard features.
• Interlocutor: In a conversation, this refers to the person you are speaking to.
• Intonation: How we change the pitch and sound of our voice when speaking. See “language content”.
• Krashen, Stephen: Krashen’s Theory of Second Language Acquisition is a highly practical theory for communicative language learning. This notion of second language acquisition consists of five main hypotheses: the Acquisition-Learning hypothesis; the Monitor hypothesis; the Natural Order hypothesis; the Input hypothesis; and the Affective Filter hypothesis. These hypotheses represent practical interpretations of what happens in language acquisition, and they form the basis of a system of language teaching called “The Natural Method.” Please see “The Krashen Revolution”.
• Language Content: Language has three components, which are commonly taught as language items.
1. “Structural items” are grammatical points about the language. CL teachers frequently introduce these as examples or model sentences, and they are often called “patterns”.
2. “Phonological items” are features of the sound system of the language, including intonation, word stress, rhythm and register. A common way to teach phonology is simply to have students repeat vocabulary using proper stress and pronunciation.
3. A “lexical item” is a new bit of vocabulary. It is sometimes difficult to decide whether an item is structural or lexical. For example, the teacher could teach phrasal verbs like “chop down” and “stand up” as lexis or structure.
• Language experience approach: An approach based on teaching first language reading to young children, but adapted for use with adults. Students use vocabulary and concepts already learned to tell a story or describe an event. The teacher writes down the information they provide, and then uses the account to teach language, especially to develop reading skills.
• Language learning requirements: To learn language, students have four needs: They must be exposed to the language. They must understand its meaning and structure. And they must practice it. Teachers should hold their students as able. They should not over-explain or make things too easy. Learning comes through discovery.
• Language skills: In language teaching, this refers to the mode or manner in which language is used. Listening, speaking, reading and writing are generally called the four language skills. Speaking and writing are the productive skills, while reading and listening are the receptive skills. Often the skills are divided into sub-skills, such as discriminating sounds in connected speech, or understanding relationships within a sentence.
• Learning burden: These are the features of the word that the teacher actually needs to be taught, and can differ dramatically from word to word. Especially in lexis, the teacher needs to reduce learning burden by, for example, reducing the number of definitions and uses presented.
• Learning factors: For EFL teachers, four factors outside aptitude and attitude affect the rate at which a student learns a second language. These are (1) the student’s motivation, including whether it is instrumental or integrative; (2) the amount of time the student spends in class and practicing the language outside class; (3) the teacher’s approach to teaching; and (4) the teacher’s effectiveness and teaching style. The most important of these motivators are the first two, which are also the two the teacher has least control over. See also “aptitude”, “attitude” and “TEFL vs. TEFL”.
• Lesson plan: An outline or plan that guides teaching of a lesson; includes the following: pre-assessment of class; aims and objectives; warm-up and review; engagement, study, activation of language (controlled, guided and free practice); and assessment of lesson. A good lesson plan describes procedures for student motivation and practice activities, and includes alternative ideas in case the lesson is not long enough or is too difficult. It also notes materials needed.
• Lexis: See “language content”, and “vocabulary”.
• Listening: See “language skills”.
• Look and say: Also called the whole-word method, a method to teach reading to children, usually in their first language; has been adapted for second-language reading; words are taught in association with visuals or objects; students must always say the word so the teacher can monitor and correct pronunciation.
• Metalanguage: Language used to describe, analyse or explain another language. Metalanguage includes, for example, grammatical terms and the rules of syntax. The term is sometimes used to mean the language used in class to give instructions, explain things, etc. – in essence, to refer to all teacher talk that does not specifically include the “target language”.
• Model/modelling: To teach by example; for example, a teacher who wants students to do an activity may first demonstrate the activity, often with a student volunteer.
• Motivation: In language instruction, the desire to learn. See “TEFL vs. TESL”.
• Motivation paradox: Students’ main motivators are factors the teacher has little control over (integrated vs. instrumental motivation, which heavily influence time on task), yet motivation is critical to learning.
• Native speakers: Those who speak English as their mother tongue.
• Needs assessment: Measurement of what students need in order to learn language and achieve their language learning goals; also may include consideration of the school syllabus.
• Non-native speakers: Those who speak English as an additional language. English is not their mother tongue.
• Objectives: Also called lesson objectives or aims; statements of student learning outcomes based on student needs; objectives state specifically what the students will be able to do in a specified time period; objectives are measurable and therefore involve specific and discrete language skills.
• Oral: Related to speaking.
• Over-correction: Correcting so much that students become reluctant to try out what they have learned.
• Paradox of language acquisition: The limited amount of comprehensible input that children receive is mathematically insufficient for them to determine grammatical principles, yet somehow they are still able to do so.
• Passive vocabulary: Vocabulary that students have heard and can understand, but do not necessarily use when they speak or write.
• Passive: Opposite of active; the false assumption that the language skills of reading and listening do not involve students in doing anything but receiving information.
• Peer correction: Also known as peer review, peer editing, or peer feedback; in writing, an activity whereby students help each other with the editing of a composition by giving each other feedback, making comments or suggestions; can be done in pairs or small groups.
• Phonemic awareness: Awareness of the sounds of English and their correspondence to written forms.
• Phonology: See “language content”.
• Placement tests: Tests used to place students in a specific language program; such tests should reflect program levels and expectations for students at each proficiency level offered by the language program.
• Prescriptive grammar: Grammar that is described in terms of grammar rules of what is considered the best usage, often by grammarians; prescriptive grammar may not agree with what people actually say or write.
• Proficiency level: Describes how well a student can use the language (often categorized as beginner, intermediate or advanced).
• Proficiency tests: General tests that provide overall information on a student’s language proficiency level or ability; can be used to determine entry and exit levels of a language program or to adjust the curriculum according to the abilities of the students.
• Rapport: Relationship, usually a harmonious one, established within a classroom between teacher and students and among students.
• Realia: Real or actual objects used as teaching aids to make learning more natural; can include forms, pictures, tickets, schedules, souvenirs, advertisements and articles from English magazines or newspapers, and so on.
• Recycling or spiralling: Sometimes called the cyclical approach; the purpose is to repeat language items throughout the syllabus; each time a language item is encountered more detail about it is added; this allows students to build on prior knowledge.
• Register: Level of formality in speech with others; register depends on the situation, location, topic discussed, and other factors.
• Scan: To read quickly for specific information; a reading stratagem.
• Skim: To read quickly for main idea or general information; a reading stratagem.
• Social context: The environment in which meanings are exchanged; can be analysed in terms of the field of discourse, which refers to what is happening, including what is being talked about; the tenor of discourse, which refers to the participants taking part in the exchange of meaning, including who they are and their relationships with each other (for example, teacher and students); and the mode of discourse, which refers to what part the language is playing in the particular situation and what “channel” (writing, speaking or a combination of the two) is being used.
• Sociolinguistics: Aspects of culture that affect communication with others; examples: social class, education level, age, gender, ethnicity. Also, see “communicative competence”.
• Strategic competence: See “communicative competence”.
• Student and teacher: Teachers have eight roles in the classroom. They are authorities and sources of knowledge; entertainers; caregivers; role models; counsellors and sometimes friends; classroom disciplinarians; directors and managers; facilitators, coaches and guides.
The most important person in the classroom is the student. The teacher’s primary focus must be on effective ways to have the student practice using his or her language. Classes should be planned so they enable the student to use just a little more language than they are comfortable with. This is known as “i+1” – an idea popularized by Stephen Krashen. This formula is short for “comprehensible input plus one.” Comprehensible input is language the students can understand.
• Student feedback: Information solicited from students by the teacher to assess the effectiveness of the teaching-learning process.
• Student-centred: Also called learner-centred, a way of teaching that centres on the goals, needs, interests and existing knowledge of the students. Students actively participate in such classrooms and may even be involved in setting learning outcomes. Teachers in student-centred classrooms ask students for input on their goals, needs and interests and on wat they know before providing them with study topics or answers to questions (for example, grammar rules). They may also ask students to generate (help produce) materials. The teacher is seen more as a facilitator or helper than the dominant figure in the classroom.
• Structure: See “language content”.
• Student-generated material: Teaching material to which the students have made a major contribution; the language experience approach, for example, uses student-generated material.
• Survey: To quickly read the headlines, subheads, opening and closing paragraphs, photo captions, pull quotes and other key materials in an article to get a sense of meaning; a reading stratagem.
• Syllabus or curriculum: The longer-term teaching plan; includes topics that will be covered and the order in which they will be covered in a course or program of studies.
• Syntax: Sometimes called word order; how words combine to form sentences and the rules governing sentence formation.
• Tape script: A written text which accompanies listening material; may be used to make cloze passages or for student review.
• Task-based syllabus: A syllabus organized around a sect of real, purposeful tasks that students are expected to carry out; tasks may include telephone use, making charts or maps, following instructions, and so on; task-based learning is purposeful and a natural way to learn language.
• Teachable moments: Times in a language class in which the teacher realizes that a point of information not in the lesson plan will help students understand a language point; teachable moments digress for a brief time from the lesson plan and can be valuable in helping student learning and keeping students engaged.
• Teacher talk: The language teachers use when teaching; involves simplifying speech for students; it may be detrimental to learning if it is childish or not close to the natural production of the target language.
• TEFL vs. TESL: TEFL is an acronym for Teaching English as a Foreign Language; TESL, for Teaching English as a Second Language. TEFL usually takes place in non-English-speaking countries, while TESL takes place in the English-speaking world.
When we speak of English as a foreign language (EFL), we are referring to the role of English for learners in a country where English is not spoken by the majority. English as a second language (ESL) refers to the role of English for learners in an English-speaking country. This difference is very important, because it strongly affects student motivation. In particular, it affects their motivation to learn.

In non-English speaking countries, students have instrumental motivation, the desire to learn English to accomplish a goal. They may want to improve their job prospects, for example, or to speak to tourists. They
1. Attend English classes with other non-native speakers.
2. Can find reasonable work without English; have less economic incentive to learn English.
3. Do not need English in daily life.
4. Have both primary and secondary support networks that function in their native language.
5. Have fewer opportunities to practice using their English.
They are learning, and their instructors are teaching, English as a foreign language.

In English-speaking countries, they have integrative motivation, the desire to learn the language to fit into an English-language culture. They are more likely to want to integrate because they
1. Generally have more friends and family with English language skills.
2. Have immediate financial and economic incentives to learn English.
3. Have more opportunities to practice English.
4. Need it in daily life; often require it for work.
5. Often attend English classes with students who speak a wide range of mother tongues.
They are learning, and their instructors are teaching, English as a second language.
• Technique: A way of presenting language.
• Thematic syllabus: Syllabus based on themes or topics of interest to the students.
• Top-down information processing: Students learn partially through top-down information processing, or processing based on how students make sense of language input – for example, through using students’ previous knowledge or schema.
• Uninterrupted sustained silent writing: A technique in writing whereby a specified, relatively short period of time is set aside in class for students to practice their writing without being interrupted. This helps build writing fluency.
• Vocabulary, importance of: Core vocabulary (the most common 2000-3000 English words) needs to be heavily stressed in language teaching. There is no point in presenting exotic vocabulary until students have mastered basic, high-frequency words. Learners should be tested on high-frequency word lists for passive knowledge, active production and listening comprehension. Learners cannot comprehend or speak at a high level without these words as a foundation.
Learners need to spend time practicing these words until they are automatic; this is known as building automaticity. Since there is often not enough class time for much word practice, teachers need to present their students with strategies for developing automaticity outside the classroom.
• Vocabulary-based syllabus: Syllabus built around vocabulary; often associated with the grammatical syllabus and the grammar translation method.
• Worksheets: Teacher-developed, paper-based activities to help students comprehend, use, and learn language; can be used in association with all skill levels and in individual and group work.

Using the Mother Tongue to Teach another Tongue

I recently updated my book Teach and Learn: Reflections on Communicative Language Teaching, and made it available on Kindle and as an inexpensive paperback. To enjoy a read, please click here.

By Peter McKenzie-Brown

“Language teaching must start afresh!” was the battle cry of a German language teacher, Wilhelm Viëtor, who published a manifesto of that name in 1886. His text lays out the weaknesses of the then-current grammar translation approach to language teaching, and proposes a surprisingly modern method to replace it.

This was one of the seminal moments for the Reform Movement in language teaching, and communicative language teaching is clearly part of the tradition that Fricke described so many years ago.

His thoughts on using the foreign language and the students’ native language in the classroom are worth noting. “It goes without saying that that the foreign language should always be spoken in class,” he says. However, “in certain circumstances, (questions about the content of a text) may have to be put in German first, then in the foreign language….” In his thoughtful commentary, he thus comes down on what I take to be the right side of an issue that has bedeviled reformers from his day to the present.

Sometimes called the principle of monolingualism, the idea is that you should essentially banish your students’ mother tongue from the foreign language classroom. This notion, which is very convenient for teachers who do not know the native language of the students they are teaching, has many advocates. This practice is essentially a product of the twentieth century. In no other age have language teachers been forbidden as a matter of principle to communicate with their students in their native language.

The widely respected methodology writer Jeremy Harmer, for example, makes a concession to the mother tongue in these words: “Where students all share the same mother tongue (which the teacher also understands), a member of the class can be asked to translate the instructions as a check that they have understood them.” The very wording of this proposal implies that the teacher should ban the mother tongue from the classroom. It certainly sounds as though Harmer wouldn’t stoop to use it himself!

Does this make sense? For some, using the students’ native language is not an option. These teachers may work in western countries where attendance sheets read like UN committee lists. Or they may have monolingual classes in developing countries whose language they have not mastered or even attempted. Much conventional wisdom about language teaching suggests that these situations are irrelevant, since the ideal language classroom should involve communication in the foreign language only. Conventional wisdom notwithstanding, there are strong arguments that the monolingual principle is an impediment to effective language teaching.

The balance of this commentary will reflect the ideas of a worthy successor to Viëtor, the 19th century German pamphleteer. Now a retired professor of language instruction in Aachen, Germany, Dr. Wolfgang Butzkamm argues that having the ability to speak the first language of your learners is a gift to be valued. All else being equal, a teacher fluent in her students’ mother tongue will be a better teacher than one who blunders in that language or doesn't know it at all. He assumes that the students are at least seven years old, by which time their native language is well established.

Here is his essential argument.

Using the mother tongue, we have learned to think, learned to communicate and acquired an intuitive understanding of grammar. The mother tongue opens the door not only to its own grammar, but to all grammars, inasmuch as it awakens the potential for universal grammar that lies within all of us….For this reason, the mother tongue is the master key to foreign languages, the tool which gives us the fastest, surest, most precise, and most complete means of accessing a foreign language.

This is a radical notion, but in many ways it makes great sense. The trick is to use the mother tongue sparingly in class. Offer brief explanations and instructions where necessary, but do not do so randomly; Butzkamm suggests particular techniques to use in the classroom. He adds,

In principle, conveying meaning is not a matter of vocabulary, but concerns the text, i.e. it takes place simultaneously on a lexical, grammatical and pragmatic level. The pupil first wants to understand not what an individual word is saying, but what the text is saying, as accurately and completely as possible. An oral utterance equivalent in the mother tongue is the best and fastest way to fulfill this basic need.

He adds that “interferences, those unwelcome imports from the mother tongue, are avoided by the sandwich technique.” The sandwich technique? This is when the teacher “inserts a translation between repetitions of an unknown phrase, almost as an aside, or with a slight break in the flow of speech to mark it as an ‘intruder’.” In this way the teacher briefly uses the mother tongue, but quickly re-establishes syntax for his students.

Butzkamm’s arguments are often complex, but they fall well within the structure of communicative language teaching. For example, he suggests that using teaching aids in the mother tongue can “promote more authentic, message-oriented communications than might be found in lessons where they are avoided…. (Also,) mother tongue techniques allow teachers to use richer, more authentic texts sooner. This means more comprehensible input and faster acquisition.”

In a comment on this post, Butzkamm pointed out that "my argument stands even if there is no such thing as a universal grammar common to all languages...in the Chomskyan sense." He continues,

Mother tongue grammars have paved the way to foreign grammars in as much as they have prepared the learner to expect and understand underlying basic concepts such as possession, number, agent, instrument, cause, condition etc, no matter by what linguistic means they are expressed in a given language. Naturally, if both the target language and the FL have adjectives, relative clauses or the pluperfect tense in common, they need not be taught from scratch, but are directly available for incorporation into the L2 system. However, the path breaking power of L1 grammar is not dependent on the fact that both languages share such grammatical features. One natural language is enough to open the door for the grammars of other languages because all languages are cut from the same conceptual cloth.

At first, some of his arguments sound like those of a CL teacher gone mad. Consider the beginning of this argument, for example: “Mother tongue aids make it easier to conduct whole lessons in the foreign language.” This sounds almost surreal until he explains that using such aids enables “pupils to gain in confidence and, paradoxically, become less dependent on their mother tongue.”

The mother tongue has a role in explaining vocabulary, Butzkamm says, but we have to me careful about it, as his explanation of the sandwich technique illustrates. In language teaching, other approaches do not work as well, he says, and can even be harmful. As importantly, “we need to associate the new with the old. To exclude mother tongue links would deprive us of our richest source” for building associations with words we already know. In general, he says, “the foreign language learner must build upon existing skills and knowledge acquired in and through the mother tongue.”

Butzkamm is not modest about his ideas. His theory, he says,

restores the mother tongue to its rightful place as the most important ally a foreign language can have, one which would, at the same time, redeem some 2000 years of documented foreign language teaching, which has always held the mother tongue in high esteem.

Hardly the first linguist to argue against the principle of monolingualism, Butzkamm’s arguments may be the most coherent and compelling. Language teachers – especially those whose students speak a common language – should remember a simple truth: knowing and judiciously using your students’ native language can make you better teachers.

A Study in Thai

I recently updated my book, Teach and Learn: Reflections on Communicative Language Teaching, from which this is a chapter, and made it available on Kindle and as an inexpensive paperback. To enjoy a read, please click here.

By Peter McKenzie-Brown

Many of the characteristic errors Thais make in English are directly related to interference from their own language and culture. “Contrastive analysis” is the process of understanding learner errors by comparing the make-up of a second language with the learner’s native tongue. In these notes, we make a start.

Thai society is highly stratified, and differences in social status are reflected in Thai grammar. The royal family has its own set of pronouns and word uses, used exclusively by its members and those who work for them. So does the Buddhist establishment. Thus, there are four major “registers” – subsets of language used in particular social settings – in Thai speech. These are royal, ecclesiastical, polite and vernacular.

Besides being stratified, Thailand has brought together diverse groups of people over a very short period of time, and the country’s borders with it neighbours are porous. As a result, Thai is one of many languages spoken in the country. Others include Khmer, along the border with Cambodia, and a variety of Burmese and tribal languages in the north and along the Thai/Myanmar border.

Thais speak four main dialects. The central dialect, which is the official language of Thailand, is spoken in Bangkok and environs. This dialect is known as klang. The other three major dialects are khammauang, spoken in the north; lao, which is used in the northeast, and tâi, which is the southern dialect.

Grammar: Thai is a flexible language which has no prefixes or suffixes, no genders for nouns, no articles, no plurals and no verb conjugations. It is a high-context language, which means it conveys much information through context rather than through linguistic rules.

On the other hand, it has at least 49 pronouns, including at least 17 for “I” and 19 for “you.” The choice of pronoun indicates the gender of the speaker: for instance, põm means “I” for a male; diichán means “I” for a female. The other pronouns indicate the degree of familiarity you have with the person you are addressing, the nature of the conversation (for example, personal or business), and the level of respect you wish to show. Personal pronouns do not change, regardless of their place within a sentence. There are no possessive pronouns in Thai.

To complicate matters further – from an English speaker’s perspective, – Thais will frequently use nouns (including proper nouns) as pronouns. For example, young girls and sometimes even young women use the Thai word for mouse as the personal pronoun “I.” Women especially, but also men, also sometimes use their personal names instead of the pronoun “I”. When talking to or about foreigners, Thais will occasionally substitute faràng (Thai for “foreigner”) for “you, him, her or them.”

Thai uses particles as polite “closing” words, or to indicate degree of familiarity between the speakers. These one-syllable words are always found at the end of a clause or sentence. Since a single sentence may have several clauses, it may also repeat the same particle several times. The most common particles are khâ (used by women) and khráp (used by men.) These particles literally mean “yes” in polite Thai, and can be used scores of times in a single conversation. Particles suggest courtesy and power relationships. Thais will sometimes explain that sentences without particles are “not beautiful.”

The main Thai dialect has five tones. Thai writing therefore requires four tone markers. These tone markers represent the high tone, the low tone, the falling tone and the rising tone. The mid-tone – also called the common tone – does not require a tone marker.

The word order in a simple Thai sentence is subject-verb-direct object. If there is an indirect object, the word order is subject-verb-direct object-indirect object. Adjectives and adverbs follow the word they modify. Numbers precede the noun.

In Thai sentence structure, you don’t use intransitive verbs when you describe Thai nouns. You say “She beautiful,” or “Computer expensive very.” In Thai, these are complete sentences. They do not require a verb.

Thai suggests plurals with the use of noun classifiers, of which there are many. In effect, Thais say “I have pen, four item” rather than “I have four pens.” Parallel structures exist in English, but they are rare – for example, “50 head of cattle.”

Thai/English Phonology: English has many features that cause difficulties for native-speakers of Thai. This summary reviews pronunciation problems that Thai learners frequently have with English pronunciation.

English has six consonant sounds that do not exist in Thai: /v, th (voiced and unvoiced), z, sh, zh/. Also, the Thai /r/ is quite different from the English retroflex /r/, and Thai speakers frequently pronounce this sound as /l/, even in their own language.

For Thais, many consonant clusters are difficult to pronounce. There are several reasons for this. For one, only two consonants maximum are permitted at the beginnings of words in Thai. In addition, there are no consonant clusters in Thai word endings. Only eight consonants – /n, m, ng, pb, dt, g, y, w/ – are allowed to occur in that position.

While English pronunciation is heavily dependent on consonants, Thai pronunciation is heavily dependent on vowels. Thai has many more vowel sounds than English, and in Thai it is important to pronounce vowels distinctly.

In English, the vowels of unstressed syllables in content words and the vowels of function words are generally reduced or even dropped. English speakers often reduce vowels to schwa (the unstressed sound “uh”); this can make them almost inaudible to the Thai ear.

English function words, which are generally unstressed, are often dramatically reduced. English speech is stress-timed rather than syllable-timed.

The Writing System: Thai uses an alphabet related to that of Sanskrit. Most native-English speakers accustomed to the relative simplicity of the Roman alphabet find it difficult to learn. The system is phonetically quite precise, however. There are few irregular spellings, and to native-Thai speakers the rules of composition are quite natural.

The Thai writing system has 44 consonants that represent only 21 distinct sounds. (Two consonants are obsolete and 12 rarely used. A number of consonants are redundant in the sense that they convey the same sound as other consonants. Part of the reason for this redundancy is that consonants are grouped into three groups – high-tone consonants, middle-tone consonants and low-tone consonants. This approach is used to enable the writer to convey tones.

Each consonant has a character name to help when spelling it out loud. For example, the first consonant in the alphabet is gaw-gài. The first syllable suggests the consonant sound, while the second represents a word (in this case gài or “chicken”) with which to associate the letter.

There are 21 vowels, which are used in various combinations to create 32 different vowel sounds – either long or short vowels. While tone markers are consistently placed above the letters of the alphabet, different vowels are placed in front of, above, behind, under or around the consonants.

The following text illustrates the main features of the Thai writing system. In addition to the placement of vowels and tone markers, note that that written Thai uses no punctuation. There are no capital letters. Full stops, question marks and exclamation marks do not end Thai sentences. Neither does the system use the complex Western arrangement of commas, colons, dashes and other characters used in European punctuation. Also, there are no spaces between words except in the case of Arabic numbers, which writers separate from the Thai text.

ในวันที่ 25 พฤษภาคม 2549 ในหลวงได้รับการถวายรางวัลจากองค์การสหประชาติในความสำเร็จทางด้านการพัฒนาความเป็นอยู่ของมนุษยชาติซึ่งนายโคฟีอันนันเลขาธิการสหประชาชาติได้นำมาถวายด้วยตัวเอง

The text refers to the Human Development Lifetime Achievement Award presented to the King by UN Secretary General Kofi Anan on behalf of the United Nations Development Programme. The award was presented on May 25, 2006 (2549 on the Buddhist calendar).

To Sum up: As this brief discussion illustrates, studying the contrasts between Thai and English can shed light on the errors your Thai students make. Enabling teachers to better understand the linguistic features of another language provides insights into the subtleties of language itself. This should help you become better at the job of teaching English.

The Stress-timed Rhythm of English

I recently updated my book, Teach and Learn: Reflections on Communicative Language Teaching, and made it available on Kindle and as an inexpensive paperback. To enjoy a read, please click here.

English is timed by the syllables we stress. It is thus irregular in rhythm.

By Peter McKenzie-Brown

Imagine yourself at public auditions in which four conductors are competing for the top job in an orchestra. Each competitor has to conduct the same piece of music, and each to the same metronome. As he waves his baton, the first conductor begins with the words, “One, two, three, four.” The second says “One and two and three and four.” The next says “One and a two and a three and a four.” And the last aspirant says “One and then a two and then a three and then a four.”

Which of these conductors will miscue the orchestra? The answer is “None.” Each of these four sentences takes exactly the same amount of time to say. This illustrates a key and yet peculiar feature of our language. It is called the stress-time rhythm of English.

Stress-timing: We can illustrate with almost any word of two or more syllables – for example, “syllable.” We stress this word using the pattern Ooo, placing primary emphasis on the first segment of the word. In English every long word has its own stress pattern. Think of the words “import” and “record,” for example. Both words can be pronounced using either the pattern Oo or the pattern oO. Which pattern you use fundamentally changes the meaning of the word.

Something else happens after you choose which syllable to stress. The pronunciation of the main vowel in the unstressed syllable changes, often to the sound ‘uh’ which is the single most common sound in the English language. This sound has its own special name, schwa, and about 30 per cent of the sounds we make when we speak English are the sound schwa. In English, schwa can be represented by any vowel.

For example, consider the following two-syllable words. The first word uses the stress patternOo; the second, the stress pattern oO. You will notice that in each case we pronounce the unstressed vowel as schwa, regardless of its spelling.
A: Atlas; Canoe
E: College; Reveal
I: Cousin; Disease
O: Anchor; Contain
U: Lettuce; Support

Statements with Noun Lists

Yes/No Questions

This practice of replacing unstressed vowels with schwa also occurs in connected speech – English as we use it in our daily lives. If I ask “Where are you from?” I will stress the word “from,” pronouncing the short ‘o’ sound quite clearly. If you answer “I’m from Sydney,” you will most likely reduce the ‘o’ to schwa. The reason is that you are likely to stress the word “Sydney” instead. This reduction of vowel is the key to the stress-timing of most forms of English.

It's worth noting that some English dialects from India, for example, are characterized by a syllable-timed rhythm. These comments refer to the English of Britain, North America  and Australia.

Native English speakers from those countries frequently use schwa in unstressed syllables. This is why it takes the same amount of time to say “One, two, three, four” as it does to say “One and then a two and then a three and then a four.” Reducing vowels enables us to speed through unstressed syllables. This is how we achieve the particular rhythm of English, in which stressed syllables are roughly equidistant in time, no matter how many syllables come in between.

Syllable-timed: Most of the world's other major languages have quite a different pattern. They are known as ‘syllable-timed’ languages. Each syllable receives approximately the same amount of stress as the others in a word or a sentence. These languages thus have quite a different rhythm from that of English. 

Vowels: When we learn to read, our teachers tell us that vowels are the characters a, e, i, o and u. Phonologically, though, a vowel is a speech sound in which the air stream from the lungs is not blocked in the mouth or throat. Usually, when we pronounce vowels we also vibrate our vocal cords.

We form the vowels in our mouths by moving five speech organs around. The most important of those organs is the tongue – language is the “gift of tongues” – and linguists often describe the vowels by the position of the tongue in the mouth. The vowels range from front to back and high to low. For example, the following ‘Sammy diagrams’ show the position of the tongue in the pronunciation of the high back vowel in the word “boot”, the low back vowel in the word “pot”, the high front vowel n the word “beat” and the low front vowel in the word “bat”.

The position of the tongue when we make vowel sounds is illustrated in the Sammies shown to the side and below.

Based on North American pronunciation, the words in the columns give examples of the 12 vowels in common use. Note that the vowel in “pot” is neither fully central nor fully back. The central vowels are essentially schwa, the sound that makes vowel possible.

In English, the high vowels, shifting from high to low, include the vowel sounds in beat, bit, bait, bet and bat. The central vowels are the mid vowels in machine and but. The back vowels, ranging from high to low, are in boot, book, boat and bought. The vowel in pot is an odd one. It is a low vowel, but it is neither fully central nor fully back.

The Sammy diagrams below, come from the book Teaching American English Pronunciation, by Peter Avery and Susan Ehrlich. So do the illustrations of how stress-timed language works.

Finally, a few graphics showing pronunciation patterns in North American English, also from Avery and Ehrlich.

The Structure of Language

I recently updated my book, Teach and Learn: Reflections on Communicative Language Teaching, and made it available on Kindle and as an inexpensive paperback. To enjoy a read, please click here.


By Peter McKenzie-Brown

You are studying a foreign language, you want to learn ten new words every day, and the mental task of managing your growing word list seems formidable. To put the job into context, consider the following from linguist Stephen Pinker.

“Children begin to learn words before their first birthday,” he says, “and by their second they hoover them up at a rate of one every two hours. By the time they enter school children command 13,000 words, and then the pace picks up, because new words rain down on them from both speech and print. A typical high-school graduate knows about 60,000 words; a literate adult, perhaps twice that number.”

Smaller than a toddler’s daily intake, your ten-word vocabulary list suddenly seems like a pauper in a palace. And the problem of properly learning vocabulary involves much more than remembering words. In the classroom, only a few words and a small part of what the learner needs to know about a word can be dealt with at any one time. For the common words, which often have multiple meanings and complex nuances, you can only teach a bit at a time. The more information you present, the more likely your learners are to misunderstand.

For both teacher and learner, vocabulary is a huge challenge. But help is at hand from vocabulary researcher Paul Nation, whose magisterial 480-page tome, Learning Vocabulary in Another Language, offers endless insights into the science and practice of teaching and learning vocabulary. He calls his preferred method of vocabulary teaching the direct approach.

Nation describes vocabulary learning as a “meeting” between the learner and the word, and he stresses that it only makes sense to have close encounters with common, useful words. Most teachers emphasize the most common 2000 English words. The most widely accepted list is available on the Internet by googling Michael West’s General Service List.

“Useful vocabulary needs to be met again and again to ensure it is learned,” Nation says. “In the early stages of learning the meetings need to be reasonably close together, preferably within a few days, so that too much forgetting does not occur. Later meetings can be very widely spaced with several weeks between each meeting.”

There are essentially four ways to learn and teach high-frequency words.
• One is direct teaching, mentioned earlier. For the language teacher, explaining vocabulary is a critical part of classroom duties.
• Also, encourage your students to participate in direct learning, which involves study from word cards and dictionary use.
• A third method, incidental learning, can involve guessing from context in extensive reading or through word use in communicative activities.
• The fourth method Nation calls “planned encounters.” These encounters include vocabulary exercises and graded reading – that is, using reading materials like shortened novels with reduced vocabulary for language learners.(Graded readers are available in many language teaching bookstores.)

Nation’s direct approach to vocabulary teaching is built upon three main ideas. First, vocabulary teaching should focus on high-frequency words that will be of continuing importance for the learners. As a teacher, you have a duty to pass over low-frequency words completely or with little comment. Also, you have to make sure the learners come back to the word frequently, to diminish the power of forgetfulness.

Also, when you teach a word you should focus on its “learning burden” – that is, the features of the word that actually need to be taught. These can differ quite dramatically from word to word. Take the word “think.” You need to explain that it is an irregular verb; that it includes the irregular spelling “thought”; and that “thought” can also be a noun.

Finally, direct teaching should be clear and simple. To learn a word in all its complexity, learners need to meet it many times. Don’t try to teach a complex word – for example, the many meanings of the word “right” – in one sitting. That kind of intensive vocabulary teaching takes place in boring classrooms, and it frequently leads to perplexed students.