The tefl.ai glossary of TEFL teaching methods, classroom techniques, assessment concepts and second-language-acquisition terms.
Needs analysis is the systematic gathering of information about what learners must be able to do in English, used to set the objectives of a course. It separates target needs, meaning the language a learner’s real situation demands, from learning needs, meaning how that particular group learns best.
Presentation, practice, production (PPP) is a three stage lesson framework for teaching a single language item. The teacher presents the target form in context, learners practise it in controlled exercises, then use it more freely in a communicative task. It remains the default shape of the trainee TEFL lesson plan and the structure most course books are built around.
Washback is the influence a test exerts on the teaching and learning that comes before it. It is positive when preparing for the exam drives genuinely useful language work, and negative when it narrows a course to test technique.
Task-based learning is an approach in which a lesson is built around a task with a real outcome rather than around a language item chosen in advance. Learners attempt the task with whatever English they have, then study the language they needed.
Interlanguage is the developing language system a learner builds while acquiring a second language, separate from both their first language and the target language and governed by rules of its own. Larry Selinker named it in 1972, reframing learner errors as evidence of a grammar in progress.
The affective filter is a hypothesised emotional barrier that stops language input from being absorbed. Proposed by Stephen Krashen in 1982, it holds that anxiety, low motivation and low self-confidence raise the filter, so a learner hears comprehensible English without acquiring it.
TEFL teaching methods are the overall frameworks that shape how a language course is taught, such as communicative language teaching, task-based learning and the lexical approach, while classroom techniques are the specific moves a teacher makes inside a lesson, such as scaffolding, drilling and eliciting. This glossary defines the twenty terms that recur most often in TEFL training and classroom observation.
