BACKGROUND TO LANGUAGE TEACHING
Drill. A technique teachers use to provide learners with practice of language. It involves guided repetition of words or sentences.
In a choral drill the teacher says a word or sentence and the learners repeat it together as a class. In an individual drill the teacher says a word or sentence and one learner repeats it.
In a substitution drill the teacher provides a sentence and a different word or phrase which the learner(s) must use (or substitute) in exactly the same structure, e.g.
Teacher: I bought a book. Pen Learner(s): I bought a pen.
In a transformation drill the teacher says a word or a sentence and the learner answers by changing the sentence into a new grammatical structure, e.g.
Teacher: I bought a pen. Didn’t
Learner: I didn’t buy a pen. Teacher: I went to the cinema. Didn’t Learner: I didn’t go to the cinema.
Concept checking is the technique of asking concept questions or using other techniques to check that learners have understood the meaning of a new structure or item of vocabulary.
Contextualise To put new language into a situation that shows what it means, e.g. when teaching the past simple tense showing learners a series of pictures of a family holiday that went wrong. See set the scene, set the context.
Elicit This is a teaching technique. When a teacher thinks that some learners know a piece of language or other information, he/she asks targeted questions or gives clues to get or prompt them to give the target language or information rather than simply providing it to the class her/himself. For example, the teacher is teaching words for different vegetables. He/she shows learners a picture of a carrot and says: What’s this? The teacher does this because he/she thinks some of the learners might be able to say: It’s a carrot.
Presentation noun, present verb
- When the teacher introduces new language. Teachers present new language, sometimes by using the board and speakingto the whole class, or they might use a text which includes the new language for their presentation. See guided discovery approach, Presentation, Practice and Production (PPP).
- When learners give a talk to their class or group; e.g. a learner does some research and prepares a PowerPoint presentation about a subject he/she is interested in.
Presentation, Practice and Production (PPP) noun
An approach to teaching new language in which the teacher presents the language using a situation, gets learners to practise it in exercises or other controlled practice activities, and then asks learners to use or produce the same language in a communicative and less controlled way. For example, teaching the present simple, John gets up at 7.00, he has breakfast, he gets dressed etc. The teacher shows learners pictures of a person (John) doing these things and shows a calendar to show the learners that the person (John) does these things every day (this is the presentation stage). The teacher checks learners understand the meaning (routine) then gets learners to repeat example sentences, in open class then in pairs (the practice stage). Finally, the learners talk to each other about their daily routines (the production stage).
Mime verb and noun
To tell a story or to communicate actions or emotions using only body movements; not using words. Teachers might use mime to show learners what a word means.