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.

Up from the Bottom or Down from the Top?

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

Psychology long ago began to debate two views – “top-down interpretation” and “bottom-up processing”– of how we understand language. Although the evidence is ambiguous, researchers generally believe they are distinct but complementary processes. For language instructors, the debate is less important than an appreciation of the roles these parallel processes play in classroom teaching and learning.

This discussion argues that good teaching practice accepts both views of language learning. However, their relative importance largely depends on the skills of the language learner.

To appreciate this, let’s begin with points of view. The advocates of “top-down interpretation” argue that background knowledge and previous experience of a situation, context, and topic play primary roles in helping us interpret meaning. We use prior knowledge and experience to anticipate, predict, and infer meaning. By contrast, the advocates of “bottom-up processing” believe language relies more heavily on decoding the sounds and letters of a language into words, clauses, sentences, and such. We then use our knowledge of grammatical, syntactic and lexical rules to interpret meaning. In this view, language users work from the bottom – the sounds they hear and the letters they encounter – to identify meaning.

To put that broad debate into context, consider that the primary focus of communicative language teaching is to develop communicative competence. CL teachers develop this competence through the use of materials and activities that focus on using language functions – for example, describing people and telling time. Because native-speakers use higher mental schema when they are processing language, language teachers develop activities that will enable their second-language learners to do the same. Broadly speaking, activities of these kinds involve top-down learning skills.

Is this always a good thing? No. Some language teachers are too quick to jump on the top-down bandwagon. In our view, better teachers are those who strike a conscious balance between top-down and bottom-up learning, which both have roles in language instruction.

According to Robert Norris, who uses listening activities to illustrate, “If we…require (our) students to use native speaker processing skills without first giving (them) a firm grounding in decoding the stream of sounds they hear, we run the risk of causing (them) more frustration and confusion than they can handle.”

We will return to Norris’s thoughtful discussion shortly. In the meantime, remember that bottom-up processing is particularly important when learners use the receptive language skills of listening and reading, because it plays a big role in making input comprehensible. And comprehensible input is the engine of effective language acquisition.

Bottom-up…: The bottom-up view assumes that listening is a process of decoding sounds and graphemes (the letters of the alphabet). We start with the smallest units, and gradually decode them until we understand the content of what we are listening to or reading.

The number of micro-skills involved is large. For example, when we listen we discriminate among the distinctive sounds of English, recognize stress patterns and the rhythmic structure of English, and discern how we use stress and intonation to signal information. Also, we need to identify words in stressed and unstressed positions and in reduced forms. We also have to recognize grammatical structures and typical word-order patterns. Meaning and comprehension are the last steps in the decoding process.

When we read, we use the building blocks of language to make meaning of what we see on the printed page. Bottom-up processes include sounds and graphemes -- the representation of sounds by letters. In English this involves word recognition for the countless irregular spellings and a sophisticated system of punctuation. We then need to to process written information through grammar and sentences. From these blocks we build comprehension.

…and Top-down: By contrast, top-down proponents believe that language processing involves the reconstruction of meaning through prior knowledge or “schema.”

Listeners actively reconstruct the original meaning of the speaker using incoming sounds and other signals like body language as clues. Prior knowledge of context and situation enables us to make sense of what we hear. A native speaker, for example, may completely zone out while hearing the news, then snatch a few brief cues that quickly draw him in. Similarly, when we begin a phone conversation to make an appointment, we shift into formal speech-patterns for such situations. This is another instance of schema guiding language use.

We also use schema to help us understand what we are reading. For example, the format of letters, emails and magazine ads are similar from culture to culture. Their format, whether in the reader’s first or second language, provides specific and useful information about what we can be likely to expect. Other top-down skills include surveying, skimming, scanning, reading for full comprehension, reading between the lines (inference), and reacting personally to reading texts. Teaching these learning strategies to your intermediate students can greatly improve their reading comprehension.

The Language Level Issue: In his excellent discussion of top-down and bottom-up teaching, Norris argues that the teaching community’s eagerness to focus on top-down teaching is sometimes misguided. “Many of the listening materials on the market today are concerned chiefly with helping learners become more adept at improving top-down skills by having them (identify relevant information while ignoring unnecessary details.)”

He adds, “In order to simulate the knowledge that native speakers bring to listening, learners are often provided with vocabulary lists prior to the task and told who the speakers are, what the situation is, and what the topic is about. However, scant attention is paid to the phonological characteristics that mark informal speech. This seems a bit like putting the cart before the horse.”

Norris makes a strong case that teachers must develop both bottom-up and top-down skills, especially at the lower levels. “Teachers are asking a lot from their students… when top-down listening tasks are given without first assessing the students' ability to do bottom-up processing.” His argument is sound. Learners need many micro-skills learners for bottom-up processing, and a good teacher neglects them at his peril. This applies especially to beginning and early intermediate students.

Wrap-up: The main conclusion of this discussion is that we need to feed both learning processes when we are teaching our students.

How and when can we use top-down processing? When you are teaching, make sure your students are aware of the format and general content of a reading, for example. Tell them they are going to read a ghost story, for example, and then elicit ideas about what the content might be, what vocabulary might occur, and so on. This switches on the ghost-story schema in their brains, and also begins activating their English skills. You can do the same with listening. Tell them you are about to listen to a sports broadcast on the Football World Cup. Elicit information about football and the vocabulary they might expect to hear, and so on. Also, of course, a CL teacher is constantly using authentic activities to teach. Thus, a role-play “in the restaurant” is by its very nature a top-down comprehension activity.

In these and many other ways, you can take advantage of your students’ ability to use top-down comprehension to get them ready for the upcoming learning activity. As your students advance, you can use more sophisticated top-down schema and strategies.

Bottom-up skills are different. As we have suggested throughout, they are usually more basic and therefore more important for lower-level students. With those students, you need to spend time helping them recognize reduced speech, for example, and irregular spellings. In the early stages of language acquisition, automaticity in word recognition is critical.

Communicative language teaching emulates real-life language acquisition, which means our work has a top-down bias. Your class needs to use authentic activities and materials to function effectively, and those materials tend to be top-down. However, focusing exclusively on top-down teaching creates problems. Especially with beginning students, spend time developing bottom-up skills.

The Krashen Revolution

By Peter McKenzie-Brown

About 25 years ago, a psychologist named Stephen Krashen transformed language teaching. He had been developing his ideas over a number of years, but several books he published in the 1980s received widespread acceptance. They quickly became the most widely accepted way to explain the twin processes of language teaching and learning. Also, with Tracey Terrell, he developed the natural approach to language teaching. One of his books is available on the web.

Much has been made of Krashen's theory of second language acquisition, which consists of five main hypotheses: The acquisition-learning hypothesis, the monitor hypothesis, the natural order hypothesis, the input hypothesis, and the affective filter hypothesis. Before we turn to these ideas, though, it is worth noting that by no means do they pertain exclusively to second language acquisition. As you read the following explanation of Krashen's five hypotheses, ask yourself whether his ideas are not equally applicable to an individual who has only one language. It seems to me that Krashen's ideas work equally well to describe how an adult native-speaker would improve her English, say, as they do to describe the process for the second language learner.

The Natural Order Hypothesis. Based on a powerful analysis of research results, Krashen’s natural order hypothesis suggests that the acquisition of language, especially the rules of language, follows a predictable natural order. For any given language, some grammatical structures tend to be acquired earlier than others. This idea reflects Noam Chomsky’s revolutionary notion that we all have a built-in Language Acquisition Device (LAD), which within the first year of our lives begins to enable us to understand and acquire language.

Because of the nature of the LAD, we tend to learn different structures at different levels as young children. Researchers have found that the same pattern occurs for older learners – not a surprise to seasoned language teachers! This is the “predictable natural order” of this hypothesis.

The Acquisition/Learning Hypothesis. The distinction between acquisition and learning is the most fundamental of all the hypotheses in Krashen's theory, since it suggests that language comes to us in two rather different ways. Acquisition is one. You acquire language by using it for real communication. Learning, which he describes as “knowing about” language, is quite a different thing.

Acquisition is the product of a subconscious process very similar to the process children undergo when they acquire their first language. It requires meaningful interaction in the target language - natural communication - in which speakers concentrate not on the form of their utterances, but in the communicative act. Learning, on the other hand, provides conscious knowledge “about” the target language. It is therefore less important than acquisition for basic communication, but it still plays an important role in language learning. To oversimplify a bit, learning is likely to occur in the “study” segment of an English lesson, while acquisition takes places during language activation.

The Monitor Hypothesis. The fundamental distinction between acquisition and learning leads directly to the next hypothesis. The monitor hypothesis relegates language learning (that is, a student’s responses to what the teacher teaches) to a secondary place in the scheme of language learning.

The monitor hypothesis is the idea that conscious learning – that is, the outcome of grammar instruction and other activities that were the traditional stock in trade of the language teacher – serve only as a monitor or an editor for the language student. Real acquisition takes place as “meaningful interaction in the target language – natural communication – in which speakers are concerned not with the form of their utterances but with the messages they are conveying and understanding.”

The Input Hypothesis. The input hypothesis suggests that people acquire language in only one way: by understanding messages, or by receiving ‘comprehensible input’. According to the input hypothesis, learner’s progress by receiving second language input that is one step beyond their current stage of linguistic competence. Acquisition for learners with language knowledge “i” can only take place if they are exposed to comprehensible input at a slightly higher level, which Krashen describes as level “i + 1”.

The Affective Filter Hypothesis. Finally, the Affective Filter Hypothesis proposes that a mental block caused by affective or emotional factors can prevent input from reaching the student’s language acquisition device. The affective filter hypothesis says that affective variables like self-confidence and anxiety play a role in language acquisition. When the filter is up – that is, when negative emotional factors are in play – language acquisition suffers. When the filter is down, it benefits.

Taken together, these hypotheses offer a practical, elegant and appealing theory of language acquisition and learning.

Putting Krashen’s Ideas to Use.
Tracy Terrell worked with Krashen to create the nuts-and-bolts practical applications of the natural approach. He borrowed widely from many methods, adapting them to meet the requirements of natural approach theory. “What characterizes the Natural Approach is the use of familiar techniques within the framework of a method that focuses on providing comprehensible input and a classroom environment that uses comprehension of input, minimizes learner anxiety, and maximizes learner self-confidence.”

He held students to a high level of accountability. They must be clear about their goals, take active roles in ensuring that input is comprehensible, make decisions about when to start producing speech, and even contribute to choices about the amount of time to be spent on grammar, for example. The teacher is a central figure in the natural approach classroom, however – the primary source of comprehensible input, and responsible for creating a friendly and encouraging class atmosphere. Also, of course, the teacher must find and introduce a rich mix of classroom activities to make the approach work.

The focus is always on introducing a little more English usage to what the students already have – i + 1, in Krashen’s formulation, – and to do so in a warm and receptive classroom. The method makes wide use of realia, props and visuals (typically magazine pictures) to introduce new vocabulary and practice comprehensible input.

Noam Chomsky's Black Box

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

What is language, and where does it come from? The answer to this question has great bearing on how we teach language.

Before the coming of Communicative Language Teaching, most thinkers believed that behaviourism – a powerful approach to psychology – explained language. In effect, according to this view, language is a set of habits we develop through mimicry of our parents and those around us.

We learn language because it brings us a reward of some kind. The basic model these thinkers – led by B.F. Skinner, a renowned Harvard psychologist – used to explain psychological phenomena is a simple one. If an organism responds in a certain way to a stimulus and gets positive reinforcement, its behaviour will be repeated. If it gets no reinforcement or negative reinforcement, its behaviour will stop. Thus, any kind of vocal output can become part of language, given sufficient reinforcement.

This model of language learning had a powerful impact on the teaching method known as audiolingualism. This method was based on the belief that language learning is basically a process of mechanical habit formation. It placed a strong focus on drills, on teaching through speech at the expense of the other skills, on inductive teaching (repeating a structure many times, then deciding for yourself how the grammar works) and on learning vocabulary within a linguistic and cultural context. This approach is still widely used in East Asia.

In effect, behaviourism denied the concept of human nature. It taught that people can be made to become almost anything, given the right sequence of stimuli and responses. On the matter of language, the logical conclusion was that there were no limitations to what language could be. Any linguistic habit that people somehow developed could become part of language. In academic circles these notions were widely accepted until Noam Chomsky turned them upside down.

The Language Instinct: In a famous phrase, Chomsky said he wanted to "look deeper" into some basic questions about human language. His early theoretical books and papers gave his answer to an extremely profound question: Is language infinitely changeable (the basis of audio-lingualism), or are all languages in some way a part of being human? In the following passage, one of Chomsky’s best-known admirers summarizes the thinker’s basic conclusions:

Language is a human instinct. All societies have complex language, and everywhere the languages use the same kinds of grammatical machinery like nouns, verbs, auxiliaries, and agreement. All normal children develop language without conscious effort or formal lessons, and by the age of three they speak in fluent grammatical sentences, outperforming the most sophisticated computers. Brain damage or congenital conditions can make a person a linguistic savant while severely retarded, or unable to speak normally despite high intelligence. All this has led many scientists, beginning with the linguist Noam Chomsky in the late 1950s, to conclude that there are specialized circuits in the human brain, and perhaps specialized genes, that create the gift of articulate speech.

Chomsky’s ideas explained the facts in a way that no other theory can. Acquiring language is not a normal mental problem. Everyone sees small children pick up language effortlessly. But few of us ever give a thought to what an amazing phenomenon this is. No one would expect a three-year-old to master calculus. Yet we are not in the least surprised when a three-year-old learns grammar, which is a much more difficult task. Children learn the rules of their native grammar (whatever it might be) by hearing a limited set of sample sentences. According to Chomsky's followers, the limited information they receive is mathematically insufficient for them to determine grammatical principles, yet somehow they are still able to do so. This is what is sometimes called “The paradox of language acquisition”. As Chomsky explained,

In a given linguistic community, children with very different grammar arrive at comparable grammars, indeed almost identical ones, as far as we know. That is what requires explanation. Each child has a different experience, each child is confronted by different data – but in the end the experience is essentially the same. As a consequence, we have to suppose that all children share the same internal constraints which characterize narrowly the grammar they are going to construct.

Chomsky proposed that each of us has a Language Acquisition Device (LAD) – what he sometimes called a “little black box” – that starts functioning when we are still infants. By the time we are five or six, that device has enabled us to vacuum from our immediate environment a native language based on universal grammar. Put another way, all languages are fundamentally the same, irrespective of the cultures we live in. They are the function of a large number of words (arbitrary symbols whose meaning is set by convention) and a limited number of grammatical rules that are somehow structured into our brains and minds.

Those who learn during the “critical period” – roughly, during early childhood – acquire language without effort. However, our little black boxes begin to function in different ways after we reach six years of age. We remain able to acquire language fairly easily until we reach puberty, after which our ability to acquire language seems to be reduced again.

Older learners must therefore learn languages in quite different ways from the effortless acquisition of young children. The ways in which language acquisition changes form are of vital importance to language teachers.

A helpful book in this area of study is How Languages Are Learned by academics Patsy M. Lightbown and Nina Spada. The two educational psychologists offer useful insights into the differences in learning styles. They say, “We have all heard people say that they cannot learn something until they have seen it. Such learners would fall into the group called ‘visual learners.’ Other people, who may be called ‘aural’ learners, seem to need only to hear something once or twice before they know it. For others, who are referred to as ‘kinaesthetic’ learners, there is a need to add a physical action to the learning process.”

These ideas are common in teaching circles. However, Lightbown and Spada go on to discuss two learning styles that are highly cultural in nature. “In contrast to these perceptually based learning styles, [there is] a cognitive learning style distinction between field independent and field dependent learners. This refers to whether an individual tends to separate details from the general background or to see things more holistically.” In general, westerners, who tend to see things as black or white, are field independent. By contrast, East Asians are field dependent inasmuch as they see things as part of a large mingling of relationships.

In their challenging text, Lightbown and Spada describe three theories about how we acquire our first language. The most important of those theories, innatism and behaviourism are covered at the beginning of this essay. A third approach is called interactionism.

The interactionist position is that “language develops as a result of the complex interplay between the uniquely human characteristics of the child and the environment in which the child develops.” A kind of umbrella that covers several different kinds of language theories, contemporary interactionism assumes the validity of Chomsky’s idea that innate structures in the mind are responsible for language learning, but has a variety of questions about the contributions of environmental factors to language learning.

In a summary of these questions, the authors propose that behaviourism may help explain our acquisition of vocabulary and other parts of grammar. For its part, innatism seems “most plausible in explaining the acquisition of complex grammar.” And “interactionist explanations may be useful for understanding how children relate form and meaning in language, how they interact in conversations, and how they learn to use language appropriately.”