ELT Glossary Terms 1-20

Vocabulary flashcards covering the first twenty terms from the ELT Glossary easy meanings study guide.

Acceptability

Whether something is correct or appropriate.

Acculturation

Learning and adopting another culture's values and habits.

Achievement test

A test that checks what students have learned.

Acquisition

Learning a language naturally, without consciously studying it.

Active vocabulary

Words you understand and can use when speaking or writing.

Adjacency pair

Two connected parts of a conversation, like a question and an answer.

Affect

The emotional effect of something.

Affective filter

Stress or fear that makes learning more difficult.

Agglutination

Joining word parts together to create meaning.

Analytic language

A language that often uses word order instead of word endings to show meaning.

Approach

A general idea or theory about how to teach and how people learn.

Appropriacy

Using language that fits the purpose, style, and situation.

Appropriateness

How suitable something is for a situation or for the learners.

Associative learning

Learning by making connections between sounds, meanings, or ideas.

Audiolingualism

A teaching approach that uses listening, repetition, and practice.

Audio-visual aid

A picture, chart, video, or recording used in class.

Aural

Related to hearing and listening.

Authenticity

How much teaching material comes from real life.

Automaticity

Using language naturally and quickly without thinking about every word.

Avoidance

Choosing easier language instead of using a difficult word or structure.

Backchaining

Practising a sentence from the end to the beginning.

Backwash (washback)

The effect that a test has on teaching and learning.

Behaviourism

Learning through habits, practice, and reinforcement.

Bottom-up processing

Understanding a text by using its words and grammar.

Cloze test

A gap-fill test where missing words must be guessed.

Cocktail party effect

Focusing on one voice while ignoring background noise.

Code switching

Changing from one language or language variety to another.

Cognate

A similar word in two languages with the same origin.

Cognition

Mental processes such as thinking and remembering.

Cognitive style

A person's preferred way of learning.

Coherence

How logically connected and easy to understand a text is.

Cohesion

How language connects the parts of a text.

Common core

Language knowledge that all learners need.

Communicative

Related to exchanging information, feelings, or ideas.

Communicative Language Teaching

Teaching focused on using language to communicate.

Communicative competence

Knowing how to use language correctly and appropriately.

Community Language Learning

A teaching method based on group support and counselling.

Comparative linguistics

Comparing languages and their structures.

Competence

A person's internal knowledge of grammar.

Comprehensible input

Language that a learner can understand and learn from.

Computer assisted language learning (CALL)

Using computers as an important part of language teaching.

Concept-checking question

A question used to check if students understand an idea.

Concordance

A computer-generated list showing how words are used together.

Concurrent validity

How closely one test's results match another similar test.

Connectivism

Learning language by making connections between ideas.

Connotation

An extra meaning or feeling connected to a word.

Consciousness raising

Helping learners notice important language features.

Construct validity

How well a test measures the skill it claims to measure.

Content-based instruction

Teaching language through knowledge from other subjects.

Content validity

How well a test covers what it should measure.