The short version

Four things worth knowing before you read the entries

• An approach is a theory of what language is, a method is a way of teaching built on one, and a technique is a single classroom move. Most arguments about methodology are really category errors.
• No method wins. Richards and Rodgers describe a field that has moved past the search for the single best method towards principled, context-sensitive choice.
• The terms that get confused most often — scaffolding and differentiation, PPP and TBL, interlanguage and L1 interference — are compared directly in the table further down.
• Every definition here is written to be quotable on its own. There is a dated citation line at the foot of the page.

Communicative Language Teaching (CLT)

Also written: CLT

Communicative Language Teaching is an approach that treats communication as both the goal of language learning and the means of achieving it. Lessons are built around meaningful interaction, information gaps and authentic tasks rather than isolated grammar drills, and accuracy is developed through use rather than demanded before it.

In practice, CLT is less a fixed lesson shape than a test you apply to your own materials: does the activity give learners a reason to speak that is not simply “because the teacher asked”? An information gap, a genuine opinion split or a decision the group has to reach will all pass that test. A substitution table will not.

Task-Based Learning (TBL)

Also written: TBLT, task-based language teaching

Task-Based Learning organises teaching around tasks with a real outcome rather than around language items. Learners attempt the task first, then examine the language they needed to complete it. The syllabus is a sequence of tasks, and grammar is addressed after use rather than presented in advance.

A task-based lesson runs pre-task, task, planning, report, then language focus. The order matters: learners meet the gap in their own English before the teacher fills it, which is what makes the language focus feel necessary rather than arbitrary. Willis (1996) and Ellis (2003) are the standard references.

The Lexical Approach

Also written: lexis-based teaching

The Lexical Approach holds that language consists of grammaticalised lexis rather than lexicalised grammar. Teaching therefore centres on chunks — collocations, fixed and semi-fixed expressions — on the grounds that fluent speech is largely assembled from prefabricated units rather than generated word by word from rules.

The classroom consequence is that you record heavy rain, make a decision and I’d rather not as single items, not as a noun plus an adjective to be combined later. Michael Lewis set this out in The Lexical Approach (1993); Nation (2013) supplies the vocabulary-acquisition evidence underneath it.

Presentation-Practice-Production (PPP)

Also written: PPP

Presentation-Practice-Production is a three-stage lesson shape in which the teacher presents a target language item, learners practise it in controlled exercises, and then produce it more freely. It is widely used in initial teacher training for its clarity, and widely criticised for assuming acquisition follows the same order.

PPP is genuinely useful when the target is small, discrete and new — a single functional phrase, a pronunciation feature, one tense contrast. It struggles when the target is a broad skill, because the production stage tends to reproduce the presented item rather than generate real use.

Total Physical Response (TPR)

Also written: TPR

Total Physical Response is a method in which learners respond physically to spoken commands before being asked to speak themselves. Developed by James Asher, it mirrors the way children act on instructions long before producing sentences, and it delays production until learners are ready rather than forcing it early.

TPR earns its place with beginners, young learners, and concrete vocabulary — verbs of movement, classroom objects, prepositions of place. It runs out of road with abstract language, which is why it works best as one stage in a lesson rather than a whole methodology.

Scaffolding

Also written: instructional scaffolding

Scaffolding is temporary, deliberately withdrawn support that lets a learner do something they could not yet manage alone. The term comes from Wood, Bruner and Ross (1976) and rests on Vygotsky’s zone of proximal development. The defining feature is removal: support that never fades is not scaffolding.

Scaffolding is a sentence starter you take away next lesson, a model you stop providing, a partner stage you eventually drop. If the same prompt is still on the board in week ten, it has stopped being scaffolding and become a permanent crutch — useful to notice, because that is the most common way the technique quietly fails.

Drilling

Also written: repetition drills

Drilling is controlled repetition of a target form to build accuracy and automaticity. Choral drills involve the whole class, individual drills a single learner, and substitution drills change one element each time. Drilling shapes pronunciation and fluency of form; it does not by itself produce the ability to communicate.

The useful discipline is to drill the thing learners actually find hard — usually the stress pattern or the weak form, not the whole sentence. Drill it, then immediately put it into a task where meaning matters, or it stays a noise the class can make on command and nowhere else.

Eliciting

Also written: elicitation

Eliciting is a technique in which the teacher draws language, ideas or answers out of learners instead of supplying them. It reveals what a class already knows, raises engagement and reduces teacher talking time — but it wastes time when the target item is genuinely unknown and simply cannot be produced.

The judgement call is how long to wait. Eliciting a word the class has met before is efficient; eliciting one they have never seen is a guessing game with the teacher as the only person who knows the rules. When two attempts produce nothing, tell them.

Teacher Talking Time vs Student Talking Time

Also written: TTT, STT

Teacher talking time is the proportion of classroom time the teacher speaks; student talking time is the proportion learners speak. The aim is not to minimise teacher talk but to make it purposeful: instructions, modelling and feedback are valuable, while extended unplanned explanation displaces the practice learners need.

A useful audit is to record ten minutes of your own lesson and mark each stretch of teacher talk as instruction, model, feedback or filler. Most teachers find the total is fine and the proportion of filler is the problem — which is a far more fixable finding than “talk less”.

Differentiation

Also written: differentiated instruction

Differentiation is adjusting content, process, product or support so that learners at different levels can work towards the same objective in one class. In language teaching it more often means varying the demand of a task or the amount of support given than setting different learners entirely different work.

In a mixed-level class, the practical unit of differentiation is usually the same text with three levels of task, or the same task with three levels of scaffolding. Tomlinson’s work on the differentiated classroom is the standard reference; the ELT-specific skill is choosing which of the four levers to pull.

Scaffolded Reading

Also written: staged reading

Scaffolded reading is a staged approach to a text in which support is front-loaded and then withdrawn: pre-teaching a small number of blocking words, setting a gist task, then moving to closer comprehension and inference work. The text stays constant while the demand placed on the learner rises.

The common error is pre-teaching too much vocabulary, which removes the reading challenge before it starts. Pre-teach only the words that block comprehension of the whole text; leave the rest to be inferred, because inferring from context is the skill the lesson is supposed to build.

Error Correction and Recasting

Also written: recasts, corrective feedback

Error correction is any teacher response signalling that a learner’s language was not target-like. A recast is one type: the teacher reformulates the utterance correctly without interrupting the flow of meaning. Recasts are unobtrusive but frequently go unnoticed by learners, which limits how much they change.

Lyster and Ranta (1997) found recasts were the most common form of corrective feedback and among the least likely to produce learner uptake. The practical implication is not to abandon recasts but to pair them with something that requires a response — a clarification request, or an elicitation of the correct form.

Formative vs Summative Assessment

Also written: formative assessment, summative assessment

Formative assessment happens during learning and feeds back into teaching — concept checking, drafts, exit tickets. Summative assessment happens at the end and reports achievement — a final exam, a placement test, a certificate. The distinction is purpose, not format: the same task can serve either function.

Because the difference is purpose, a progress test becomes formative the moment you use its results to change next week’s lesson, and stays summative if you only record the mark. That is why the question “is this formative or summative?” is better asked as “what will I do with the result?”

Washback

Also written: backwash

Washback is the influence a test exerts on the teaching and learning that comes before it. It is positive when exam preparation drives genuinely useful language work, and negative when it narrows a course to test technique. The concept is standard in the language-testing literature.

Alderson and Wall (1993) asked whether washback exists at all, and concluded the effect is real but far less automatic than assumed — teachers mediate it. For a course that ends in an exam, the design question is which parts of the test are worth teaching towards and which are merely worth practising.

Backward Design

Also written: understanding by design, UbD

Backward design is a planning sequence that starts with the desired learning outcome, then decides what evidence would show it has been achieved, and only then plans the lessons. Popularised by Wiggins and McTighe, it reverses planning that starts from activities or from the next page of the coursebook.

The three stages are: identify desired results, determine acceptable evidence, plan learning experiences. Applied to a language course, stage two is usually the one that gets skipped — and skipping it is how a syllabus ends up full of good activities that nobody can say learners have learned from.

Needs Analysis

Also written: needs assessment

Needs analysis is the systematic gathering of information about what learners must be able to do in English, in order to set course objectives. It distinguishes target needs — the language demanded by the learner’s real situation — from learning needs, which describe how that particular group learns best.

Hutchinson and Waters (1987) drew the target-needs and learning-needs distinction that most ESP course design still uses. For a business or exam class, a needs analysis run in week one is worth more than any amount of coursebook selection done in advance.

Reflective Practice

Also written: reflective teaching

Reflective practice is the disciplined habit of examining one’s own teaching against evidence in order to change it. It requires a record — notes, recordings, peer observation, learner feedback — because unaided recall of a lesson reliably reconstructs what the teacher intended rather than what actually happened.

Schön’s distinction between reflection-in-action (adjusting mid-lesson) and reflection-on-action (reviewing afterwards) is the useful one. The habit that makes it stick is small and dull: three lines after each lesson on what learners found hard, written before you leave the room.

Affective Filter

Also written: affective filter hypothesis

The affective filter is a hypothesised emotional barrier that stops comprehensible input from becoming acquired language. Proposed by Stephen Krashen, it holds that anxiety, low motivation and low self-confidence raise the filter, so input reaches the learner but is not absorbed. It explains why a stressed class learns less.

Whatever one makes of Krashen’s wider model, the classroom implication has held up well: the same lesson delivered to an anxious group and a relaxed one produces different learning. Lowering the filter is why pair work precedes whole-class production, and why correcting every error during a fluency stage is counterproductive.

Interlanguage

Also written: learner language

Interlanguage is the learner’s own developing language system, distinct from both their first language and the target language, and governed by rules of its own. Named by Larry Selinker in 1972, the concept reframes learner errors as evidence of a systematic grammar in progress rather than simple failure.

Interlanguage is why a learner who has just met the past simple starts producing goed and buyed — forms they have never heard. That is not deterioration; it is a rule being over-applied, which means the rule has been learned. Selinker’s related idea of fossilisation describes what happens when the system stops developing.

L1 Interference

Also written: negative transfer, mother-tongue interference

L1 interference is the influence of a learner’s first language on their English, also called negative transfer. It produces predictable errors in sound, word order, article use and false friends. Interference explains why errors cluster by nationality, and why knowing a group’s L1 lets a teacher anticipate them.

Transfer is not only negative: where the two languages align, the L1 helps. The teaching value of the concept is predictive — if you know your class is Spanish-speaking, you can plan for people is and for the missing initial /s/ cluster before anyone produces them.

How to cite this definition

tefl.ai (2026) TEFL Teaching Methods & Classroom Techniques: A Teacher’s Glossary. Written by Katie Troy. Published 26 August 2026. Available at: https://tefl.ai/tefl-teaching-methods-glossary/

To cite a single entry, add the term and its anchor — for example https://tefl.ai/tefl-teaching-methods-glossary/#scaffolding. Definitions on this page were last reviewed on 26 August 2026.