Where the terms come from

The pair belongs to the standard teacher training vocabulary for reading, and the British Council’s own glossary gives the two definitions in one line each: Skimming is reading a text quickly to get a general idea of what it is about and Scanning is reading a text quickly to pick out specific information. Its Teaching Knowledge Database entries define each one against the other, which is a useful signal in itself. Neither term is fully defined without the other.

The reason they are taught at all is the reason adults read this way outside a classroom. A reader looks at a news page to see whether anything matters to them, then looks at a timetable to find one departure. Neither act involves reading the page. A learner who treats every English text as something to be decoded word by word is slower than they need to be in exactly the situations where speed is the point.

In language testing the same two behaviours are placed inside a larger model. Cambridge describes reading as a set of decisions the reader makes before and during the task, including whether it needs to be local or global, careful or expeditious, and places the pair precisely: Scanning for specific information requires expeditious local reading, whereas searching for important details and skimming for gist require expeditious global reading. Expeditious reading, in the formulation Katalayi and Sivasubramaniam quote, involves a quick, selective and efficient reading to access needed text information.

The Council of Europe’s framework takes the same two behaviours and treats them as one purpose rather than two techniques. They sit together in the Reading for orientation scale, which describes a reader working through material to find out whether it contains anything useful, and locating it when it does.

The difference in one table

The row that does most of the work is the second one. Scanning is easier than skimming because the reader already knows what the target looks like, which is why a scanning task with a clear target succeeds even with learners whose general comprehension is weak. Skimming asks for a judgement about a text the learner has not read, and that is a harder thing to do in a second language than it looks.

Where they sit among the ways of reading

Neither term means fast reading in general, and neither is the opposite of careful reading on its own. The Cambridge model crosses two decisions, how carefully and how widely, which gives four kinds of reading rather than two.

The third term in that top row is the one teachers rarely name. Search reading sits between the other two: the reader knows the topic they want but not the exact words it will appear in, which is what somebody does when looking through a long report for whatever it says about costs. A lesson that offers only skimming and scanning leaves out the kind of reading learners most often need for study.

Using them in a lesson

1. Set the purpose before the text is visible. This is the whole technique. A reason to read that arrives after the text does is not a reason, because the reading has already started.
2. Give one question for a skim, several for a scan. A single global question keeps learners out of the detail. A scan needs a short list of targets so that the hunt repeats and becomes quick.
3. Time it, and make the time slightly uncomfortable. The British Council’s own note on skimming is that teachers often set it as a timed task to encourage speed. Thirty to sixty seconds for a skim of a page is enough to stop a careful read breaking out.
4. Say out loud that the whole text is not to be read. Learners who have been taught to value thoroughness will not stop reading just because the clock is running. They need permission.
5. Check the instructions. Two concept checking questions take half a minute. Are you reading every word. How long have you got.
6. Do the feedback on how, not only on what. Ask where in the text the answer was and what told them to look there. The transferable part of the lesson is the strategy, not the answer.
7. Put the careful reading after, not instead. The usual sequence is skim for the shape, scan or search for what is needed, then read closely only the part that matters. The three stages teach each other.

A worked classroom example

A B1 class of fourteen adults in Galway, a lesson built on a 700 word web article about a summer arts festival. The text is face down on the desk before anything is said about it.

Skim, one minute. One question on the board before the page is turned: is this article mainly about the programme, the ticketing, or the money the festival brings into the town. Learners turn the page, read for sixty seconds, turn it back. Hands up for the three options. Nobody is asked to justify the choice in detail yet.

Scan, ninety seconds. Four targets on the board: the dates, the price of a day ticket, the name of the main venue, and the number of acts. Learners race. The targets are deliberately all short and visually distinctive, which is what makes scanning feel different from reading.

Feedback on the strategy, four minutes. Where did you look first for the price. How did you know the dates were near the top. Several learners will say they found the dates without reading the sentence around them, which is the exact behaviour the stage is meant to produce, and it is worth naming when it happens.

Careful reading, twelve minutes. Now the class reads one paragraph properly, the one on what the festival costs the council, with comprehension questions that need inference. By this point learners know where that paragraph is and roughly what it says, so the hard reading starts from a position of orientation rather than from nothing.

Transfer, five minutes. A second short text, a one minute skim, one question. The point of repeating it in the same lesson is that a strategy practised once is an activity, and a strategy practised twice begins to be a habit.

Commonly confused with

What the evidence actually supports

They are two different things, and the research names them separately. The Cambridge model places scanning as expeditious reading at the local level and skimming as expeditious reading at the global level. That is not a stylistic distinction. The two make different demands, and a learner can be good at one and poor at the other.

The boundaries between the fast strategies are genuinely blurred. Katalayi and Sivasubramaniam, reviewing work in this tradition, record that skimming, search reading and scanning involved some overlapping processes and actions, enough that researchers have disagreed about the labels. Teachers who find the distinction slippery in practice are not misunderstanding it.

Tests, and by extension many lessons, weight careful reading far more heavily. In their own analysis of fifty multiple choice items from a national examination, Katalayi and Sivasubramaniam classified thirty two items, sixty four per cent, as targeting careful reading, against eighteen items, thirty six per cent, targeting expeditious reading. If reading practice follows the shape of the test, fast reading gets a small fraction of the time.

Scanning items tend to be the easy ones. The same literature associates items that require scanning with the easiest reading tasks, which is an argument for using them to build confidence and against treating a successful scan as evidence that a text has been understood.

The limits are worth stating. Much of this work comes from language testing rather than from classrooms, and it describes what readers do during a test rather than what they can be taught to do over a course. The model is a well evidenced description of reading behaviour. It is not, in itself, proof that teaching the labels to learners improves their reading, and that step is still an inference.

Sources and further reading

The six linked sources below were opened and checked on 4 November 2026. The remaining items are books with no freely readable edition to link to, so they are cited bibliographically rather than linked.

Frequently asked questions

What is skimming and scanning?

Skimming is reading a text quickly to get a general idea of what it is about. Scanning is reading a text quickly to pick out specific information. Both are fast, selective ways of reading in which most of the text is deliberately left unread, and they differ in what the reader is looking for: the shape of the whole text in one case, a single item in the other.

What is the difference between skimming and scanning?

The difference is the purpose, and it shows in what the reader knows before starting. A reader who skims does not yet know what the text contains and is trying to find out. A reader who scans already knows exactly what is wanted, often down to its form, such as a time or a price, and is looking for a match. Skimming is global and produces a gist. Scanning is local and produces one fact.

Which comes first in a lesson, skimming or scanning?

Skimming, in the usual sequence. A short global task orients learners to the text, after which scanning or close reading has somewhere to start from. The one exception is a text whose only purpose is retrieval, such as a timetable or a listings page, where there is no gist worth building and scanning is the whole task.

Are skimming and scanning skills or strategies?

Both words are used, and the difference matters less in a classroom than it does in a research paper. Teacher training materials usually call them reading sub skills. Testing research treats them as types of reading or as strategies a reader selects according to purpose. What is consistent across both is that the reader chooses them deliberately, which is the part worth teaching.

How do you teach skimming and scanning to lower level learners?

Keep the text short and the target visually distinctive, and start with scanning, which is the easier of the two. Numbers, dates, capitalised names and prices can be found by learners whose general comprehension is still weak, and finding them quickly builds the confidence to try a skim. Always set the time limit and the question before the text is handed out.

What is search reading, and how is it different from scanning?

Search reading is looking through a text for whatever it says about a topic, rather than for a target the reader could name in advance. Scanning matches a known item. Search reading requires the reader to judge relevance as they go, which makes it harder and more useful for study, and it is the fast reading strategy most often left out of lessons.

Related terms in this glossary

• Jigsaw reading, where the same reading sub skills are put to work inside a speaking task.
• Comprehensible input, the argument for texts learners can mostly understand, which is what makes fast reading possible at all.
• Concept checking questions, the half minute that stops a timed reading task being misunderstood.
• Guided discovery, the same principle applied to language rather than to text: let learners find it before you explain it.
• The full TEFL teaching methods and classroom techniques glossary.

For the qualification and career terminology behind classroom practice, see TEFL qualifications and terminology explained on The TEFL Institute. For what Irish employers ask for and how much practical teaching a course covers, see 120 hour versus Level 5 TEFL on The TEFL Institute of Ireland.

Last updated 4 November 2026. Written by Katie Troy for tefl.ai. All linked external sources were opened and checked on that date.

Key takeaways

• In a June 2026 Resume Genius survey of United States hiring managers, 87 per cent said they use AI somewhere in recruitment and 58 per cent use it to screen CVs and applications. Language schools and online platforms buy the same software as everyone else.
• The UK Information Commissioner’s Office audited AI recruitment tool providers between August 2023 and May 2024 and issued 296 recommendations, including against tools that inferred a candidate’s gender or ethnicity from their name.
• Demand is shifting rather than vanishing. South Korea issued 1,286 E-2 teaching visas in the first quarter of 2026, down 47 per cent on the same period in 2020, according to Ministry of Justice figures reported by the Korea JoongAng Daily, with AI learning apps named as a cause.
• In the British Council’s study of 1,348 English teachers, 51 per cent rejected the idea that AI could teach English without a teacher by 2035, and only 20 per cent felt sufficiently trained to use it.
• Under the EU AI Act, AI used to recruit or select workers is classed as high risk. After the 2026 Digital Omnibus, those obligations apply from 2 December 2027.
• The teachers winning in this market are the ones whose applications survive the software and whose interviews show the judgement the software cannot assess.

What is actually changing in TEFL and ESL hiring?

The change is in the front half of the hiring funnel, not the back half. AI tools now source, sort, score and shortlist TEFL and ESL candidates, while the final decision still sits with a director of studies, a recruiter or a programme coordinator who is very much a human being with a coffee going cold.

That matters because for twenty years the TEFL job hunt ran on volume. You sent the same CV to forty schools, three replied, one interviewed you on Skype and you packed a suitcase. The volume game is over, because the thing reading your forty applications is now software that compares all forty of them in the same second and discards the ones that do not match the job description closely enough.

The UK government’s Responsible AI in Recruitment guidance, published by the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology in March 2024, maps AI onto four stages of hiring: sourcing, screening, interview and selection. It also records a risk that should interest anyone applying to teach English abroad. Transcription tools used on interview recordings, the guidance says, can be biased against regional and non native English speakers. The same software that filters candidates for a language school can misjudge the people most likely to apply to one.

None of this means a robot is choosing who teaches in Madrid next September. It means the robot is choosing who gets to be considered, which for the applicant is almost the same thing.

Where is AI already sitting in the hiring process?

AI sits at every stage before the human interview, and increasingly inside it. The clearest recent picture comes from a Resume Genius survey of United States hiring managers fielded in June 2026: 87 per cent use AI in recruitment, 58 per cent use it to screen CVs and applications, 44 per cent use it to match candidates to jobs on skills, 41 per cent use it to schedule interviews and 18 per cent run AI assisted video interviews. Those are general figures rather than ELT specific ones, but the online teaching platforms and international school groups that hire at scale are precisely the employers who buy this software first.

The ICO’s audit of AI recruitment tools describes what the software actually does. Screening tools score competencies from written applications and predict how likely a candidate is to succeed in selection. Selection tools score written answers to interview questions, score transcripts of video interviews, and in some cases evaluate a candidate’s language, tone and content on video to predict personality type. The ICO found tools that let recruiters filter out candidates by protected characteristics, tools that inferred gender and ethnicity from a name, and tools collecting far more personal data than they needed. It made 296 recommendations and 97 per cent were accepted.

Here is how the stages compare for a typical TEFL applicant. Figures are approximate and describe a typical range rather than any one employer.

The demo lesson row is the one to notice. Government programmes still interview people. EPIK, the English Program in Korea run under the Ministry of Education, invites successful applicants to an online interview with its own staff before any documents are requested. Private schools and platforms, which hire in far greater numbers, are the ones automating the front door.

What are employers now asking TEFL teachers for?

Employers are asking for the same core qualification as before, plus evidence that you can work with AI rather than be replaced by it. The review above is of The TEFL Institute Group’s accredited course, the group behind tefl.ai, and the phrase worth noticing is “a career in the TEFL world”. The qualification gets you through the first filter. What happens next depends on skills that did not exist on a job description five years ago.

Three things have moved up the list. The first is a verifiable certificate rather than a PDF, because document checks are now automated and an unverifiable certificate is quietly scored as no certificate. The second is a recorded presence: schools want to see you teach on camera before they fly you anywhere, and recorded demos are compared against each other. The third is AI literacy, which an increasing number of schools now treat as a professional competence in its own right.

That third point has official backing. UNESCO’s AI competency framework for teachers, published in 2024, sets out 15 competencies across five dimensions, from a human centred mindset and the ethics of AI through to AI pedagogy and AI for professional development. When UNESCO began the work, only seven countries had any AI competency framework for teachers at all. Ministries, international school groups and the larger online platforms are now writing it into recruitment criteria, which is why documented competence such as the AI-Skilled Teacher Certificate has become a sensible line on a TEFL CV rather than a novelty.

Is demand for English teachers falling because of AI?

Demand is moving, and in some markets it is falling, but the cause is a mix of AI, policy and demographics rather than AI alone. The honest answer for anyone asking whether TEFL jobs are disappearing is that certain job types are shrinking fast while others are growing, and the difference is visible in official data.

South Korea is the clearest case. The Korea JoongAng Daily reported in May 2026, using Ministry of Justice statistics, that 1,286 E-2 foreign language instructor visas were issued in the first quarter of 2026, a six year low and 47 per cent below the 2,448 issued in the same quarter of 2020. The paper linked the decline to AI learning apps that let people study without a teacher, to better instant translation changing how important English feels for a job, and to the closure of many private academies. Speak, an AI speaking practice app, was Google Play’s app of the year in Korea in 2024 and had around 316,000 active Korean users by March 2026.

China moved earlier and for different reasons. The Ministry of Education reported in December 2021 that the number of offline academic tutoring institutions had fallen by 83.8 per cent and online ones by 84.1 per cent after the Double Reduction policy. That was regulation, not AI, but it removed the online tutoring platforms that had been the largest single employer of remote ESL teachers, and AI tutors are now filling part of the gap those platforms left.

Against that, the wider market has not collapsed. The group’s own Future of AI in English Language Teaching and TEFL report estimates more than two million TEFL positions opening globally each year and some 12 million English teachers worldwide, with the fastest growth in Asia Pacific and the Middle East. The jobs are there. They are more competitive, more often filtered by software, and less often the easy conversational hagwon or cram school roles that once absorbed thousands of first year teachers.

Will AI replace teachers in the classroom?

No, and the people best placed to know are the teachers themselves. In the British Council’s study of 1,348 English language teachers across 118 countries, 51 per cent disagreed that AI could teach English without a teacher by 2035, and the most common reason given was the human element of the classroom. We looked at that dataset in detail in our piece on the future of AI in English language teaching, and the short version is that AI is excellent at the layer of teaching that happens before the lesson and poor at the layer that happens during it.

The same study carries the warning that matters for hiring. Only 20 per cent of those teachers felt sufficiently trained to use AI, while 54 per cent felt inadequately trained. Employers can see that gap too, and a growing number are hiring for it. A teacher who can show they use AI to plan, level and mark without handing over judgement is a cheaper hire to onboard than one who has never opened the tools, and a far safer one than a teacher who pastes learner data into a free chatbot.

The UNESCO framework and the ICO both point the same way: AI should complement the teacher rather than replace them, and a human must stay accountable for high stakes decisions. The EU AI Act goes further and writes it into law. AI systems used for recruitment and selection, and systems used to evaluate learning outcomes in education, are listed as high risk. Those obligations were due in August 2026 and, following the Digital Omnibus agreed in 2026, now apply from 2 December 2027. Whatever the final date, the direction is settled. Software may rank you, but a person has to be able to explain why.

How do you get past AI screening for a TEFL job?

You get past AI screening by giving the software exactly what it is scoring for and giving the human what the software cannot score. That means a CV whose wording mirrors the job advert, a certificate the checker can verify, a recorded interview that is clear and structured, and a demo lesson that shows judgement.

Start with the CV. Screening tools score against the job description, so if the advert says “young learners”, “CEFR” and “online classroom management”, those exact phrases need to appear in your application, not approximate synonyms. Our guide to writing a TEFL resume with AI walks through the drafting process, and the free CV and cover letter generator on tefl.ai produces a first version built around a specific advert in a couple of minutes. Edit it hard afterwards. In the Resume Genius survey, 82 per cent of hiring managers said they were concerned about candidates using AI in applications and 58 per cent had already received AI generated CVs or cover letters, so a generic draft is now a recognisable type of document rather than a clever shortcut.

Then the interview. Recorded one way interviews are transcribed and scored, which rewards short answers with a clear structure: the situation, what you did, what happened. Accent is not the problem, mumbling is, because transcription software handles clear speech from any variety of English far better than fast speech from any variety. The AI mock interview approach we described earlier this year is useful here precisely because it makes you practise answering a machine. Note the survey finding that 46 per cent of hiring managers have caught candidates using AI to answer interview questions live. They are looking for it, and it reads as exactly what it is.

Before any of that, check you are applying for jobs you can actually be hired for. Eligibility is still decided by passport, degree, certificate hours and background checks, as our explainer on how TEFL eligibility works sets out, and no amount of keyword tuning changes that. The free Job Readiness Checker gives you an honest read on where you stand before the software does.

What should a TEFL teacher do about this now?

Treat the hiring process as a system with two gates and prepare for both. The first gate is automated and tests fit on paper. The second is human and tests judgement in a room, real or virtual. Most unsuccessful applications in the current market fail at the first gate without the applicant ever knowing it existed.

In practical order: choose a course whose certificate can be verified online, because automated document checks are now routine, and our guide to choosing a TEFL course covers what to look for. Build a CV and a short teaching video that answer the advert directly. Learn the AI tools well enough to describe your workflow in an interview, because “I use AI to draft levelled materials and check every item before class” is now a hiring signal. Then use the Job Market Explorer to aim at markets where demand is growing rather than the ones where the visa statistics are heading the wrong way.

The teachers who will do well in the next five years are not the ones who fear AI or the ones who outsource their thinking to it. They are the ones who understand that it now sits between them and every job they apply for, and who learn to walk through it with their judgement intact.

Where the idea comes from

The information gap belongs to the communicative approach, and it is the mechanism that approach uses to answer an awkward question: why would anyone in a classroom ask a question they already know the answer to. The British Council’s own teacher training materials put the principle in one line: An information gap is where one person knows something or has some information that the other person doesn’t, and they add the reason it matters, which is that real communication often contains an information gap.

The idea was given a working shape by N. S. Prabhu during the Bangalore project in the 1980s. His three task types are still the standard division: information gap, reasoning gap and opinion gap. An information gap task moves a fact from one person to another. A reasoning gap task asks learners to work something new out from what they hold. An opinion gap task asks for a preference, a feeling or an attitude, which Prabhu described as identifying and articulating a personal preference, feeling, or attitude in response to a given situation.

Research borrowed the same device almost immediately. As Pica, Kang and Sauro record, information gap tasks entered second language acquisition research through Long in 1980 as a way of studying what happens when learners have to make themselves understood. That double life, a classroom staple and a laboratory instrument, is why there is more evidence about this technique than about most things teachers do.

The two conditions that make a gap real

A great many activities are called information gaps and are not. The test has two parts, and both have to hold.

One. The information is uniquely held. Something one learner can see, hear or remember is unavailable to the other. If both sides are looking at the same page, there is no gap, whatever the worksheet is called.

Two. The task cannot be completed without the exchange. The outcome depends on information the learner does not have. If the activity can be finished alone, more slowly, the speaking is optional, and in most classes optional speaking does not happen.

The second condition is the one teachers lose. A gap can be perfectly well designed and then dissolved by a task that only needs half the information, and the activity will look like a speaking exercise that fell flat rather than a task that was never going to require speech.

One-way and two-way gaps

Information can be distributed in two shapes, and the difference decides who has to talk.

A one-way task gives everything to one learner. They describe, instruct or dictate while the partner draws, builds or writes. Describe and draw in its simplest form is one-way. It is easy to set up and it is the right shape when the point is extended speaking from one side, or listening from the other.

A two-way task splits the information so that each learner holds part of it and needs the rest. Spot the difference, split timetables, incomplete biographies and jigsaw readings are all two-way. Everyone has to ask as well as tell, which is why nobody can sit the task out.

The practical reading of the classroom research is that the two-way requirement is worth building in deliberately. Doughty and Pica compared teacher-fronted, small-group and paired arrangements on a task that required an exchange of information, and concluded that group and pair work have to be planned to include a requirement for a two-way or multi-way exchange. The grouping on its own did not produce the interaction. The task requirement did.

Building one in practice

1. Decide what the missing information is. Start from the fact, not the format. A departure time, a price, a middle name, the fourth step in a process. If you cannot name the missing fact, there is no gap yet.
2. Split it so that neither side can finish alone. Two versions of the same worksheet, A and B, each complete where the other is blank, is the standard and still the quickest to make.
3. Close the task. Give it one correct outcome: a completed table, two matching drawings, a correct order of events. A closed task is what makes learners keep asking until the answers agree.
4. Pre-teach the language of asking. Learners cannot close a gap with vocabulary they do not have. The question form, the ways of asking for repetition and the phrases for saying you did not catch something are the lesson’s real target language.
5. Check the instructions with concept checking questions. Can you look at your partner’s paper. What do you do if you do not understand. Two questions, thirty seconds, and most of the failures below disappear.
6. Separate the papers physically. Facing pairs, sheets held up, folders as screens. The design is undone the moment the partner’s sheet is visible.
7. Monitor without repairing. The breakdowns are the point. Note what learners could not say and deal with it in feedback rather than supplying the words at the table.

A worked classroom example

An A2 class of twelve adults in Cork, a lesson on telling the time and daily routine. The teacher makes two versions of a train timetable between four Irish towns. On sheet A, the departures from Cork and Mallow are printed and the ones from Limerick and Ennis are blank. On sheet B it is the other way round. The task is to work out which train a passenger must take to be in Ennis before four in the afternoon, which neither sheet answers on its own.

Language first, six minutes. What time does the train to Limerick leave. Sorry, could you say that again. The teacher drills both and leaves the question form on the board.

Setup, two minutes. Pairs face each other with the sheets held up. Two concept checking questions: can you see your partner’s timetable, and what do you say if you do not hear a number.

Exchange, twelve minutes. Each learner fills the blanks on their own sheet by asking. Numbers get misheard, which is useful, because the correction happens through repetition rather than through the teacher.

Outcome, five minutes. Pairs agree the one train that works and write it down. Answers that disagree send the pair back to the timetable, which is the closed task doing its job.

Feedback, five minutes. The teacher puts three things learners could not say on the board and reformulates them. The timetables are swapped and compared at the end so everyone sees the full version.

The wider family of gaps

Information is not the only thing learners can be short of, and the British Council’s own article on the subject widens the idea usefully. A gap, it says, is a difference: If there are two learners, A and B, and if A has some information which B does not, and possibly vice versa, then there is a difference or gap between the two learners.

The practical value of the list is that the last three are free. An experience gap or an opinion gap exists in the room already and needs no photocopying, which is the argument for personalisation: real information about the learners is the cheapest gap a teacher has.

Commonly confused with

What the evidence actually supports

The task requirement matters more than the grouping. Doughty and Pica compared teacher-fronted, small-group and dyadic arrangements on a required information exchange task and concluded that group and pair work must be planned to include a requirement for a two-way or multi-way exchange of information. Putting learners in pairs is not the intervention. Giving them different information is.

Closed, precision-oriented tasks produce the clearest interaction. Pica, Kang and Sauro describe tasks that are closed-ended and precision oriented and require the exchange of uniquely held information, and report that these promote modified interaction and orient learners’ attention to form, function and meaning. That is a direct argument for the closed outcome in step three above.

They are not effortless to run. Pica’s later account of working with teachers is candid about the integration problems: tasks designed for research are not automatically good classroom activities, and making them serve both purposes took deliberate redesign. Teachers reporting that information gaps feel artificial are describing something the literature also found.

The limits are worth stating. Much of this work involves small numbers of learners in short studies, often in dyads rather than full classes, and it measures interaction rather than long-term acquisition. It shows that certain task designs reliably produce more negotiation of meaning. It does not establish how much of that negotiation converts into durable language, and the step from one to the other is still an inference.

Sources and further reading

The six linked sources below were opened and checked on 30 October 2026. The remaining items are books and a journal article with no freely readable edition to link to, so they are cited bibliographically rather than linked.

Frequently asked questions

What is an information gap?

An information gap is a difference in what two or more people know. In language teaching it is used deliberately: the teacher gives each learner part of the information and withholds the rest, so that the only way to complete the task is to ask for what is missing. The British Council defines it as the situation where one person knows something or has some information that the other person does not.

What is an example of an information gap activity?

Describe and draw is the standard example. One learner has a picture the other cannot see and describes it while the partner draws, and the two drawings are compared at the end. Spot the difference, split dictations and jigsaw readings and listenings are the other types the British Council lists. In each of them the information is held by one side only.

What is the difference between an information gap and pair work?

Pair work describes who is talking to whom. An information gap describes who knows what. Learners can sit in pairs with identical worksheets in front of them, which is pair work with no gap and usually very little talking. The useful question is not how the class is arranged but whether a learner could complete the task without asking anybody.

What are the three gap types in task-based learning?

Prabhu distinguished information gap, reasoning gap and opinion gap activities. An information gap task transfers a fact from one person to another. A reasoning gap task asks learners to derive new information from what they have by inference or deduction. An opinion gap task asks for a personal preference, feeling or attitude, so there is no single correct outcome to converge on.

Does an information gap have to work in both directions?

No. A one-way task gives all the information to one learner, who describes it while the other listens, draws or writes. A two-way task splits the information so that both sides have to ask as well as tell. Two-way tasks oblige everyone in the group to speak, which is why the research literature treats a required two-way exchange as the design feature that matters.

Why do information gap activities fail in class?

Almost always because the gap was not actually created. The commonest causes are identical worksheets, learners who can see each other’s papers, a task that can be answered from one half of the information, and instructions that were not checked, so the pair compares answers instead of exchanging them. All four are setup faults rather than learner faults.

Related terms in this glossary

• Jigsaw reading, the best known application of this principle, where a divided text supplies the gap.
• Task-based learning, the approach that made the gap a design principle rather than an occasional activity.
• Concept checking questions, the thirty seconds of checking that prevents most information gap failures.
• Fluency versus accuracy, the pair of goals a closed gap task sits between, since it pushes talk and still has a right answer.
• The full TEFL teaching methods and classroom techniques glossary.

For the qualification and career terminology behind classroom practice, see TEFL qualifications and terminology explained on The TEFL Institute. For what Irish employers ask for and how much practical teaching a course covers, see 120 hour versus Level 5 TEFL on The TEFL Institute of Ireland.

Last updated 30 October 2026. Written by Katie Troy for tefl.ai. All linked external sources were opened and checked on that date.

Aspect, not time

The present continuous is usually introduced as the tense for things happening now. That is a serviceable first lesson and a poor description of the form, because the same three words cover an action in progress this second, a situation that has lasted a year, and a dinner arranged for Friday.

What the form actually encodes is aspect. The Cambridge TKT Glossary defines aspect as a way of looking at verb forms without looking specifically at the time of the action or event, and states that there are two aspects in English, the continuous/progressive aspect and the perfect aspect. The continuous aspect presents an event from inside it, as something unfinished and bounded, rather than as a complete fact.

The British Council and BBC TeachingEnglish Teaching Knowledge Database makes the same point from the teacher’s side, and its example is the present continuous: tenses of the verb go include present continuous ‘We’re going to the party tonight’. Its classroom note is blunt. Teachers have to establish with learners that tense does not mean time.

That is the reason a lesson built only on the word now runs into trouble three lessons later, when the same form turns up in I’m staying with my sister this month and We’re flying on Tuesday, and the rule the class was given no longer fits what they are reading.

The form

The British Council’s LearnEnglish reference states the formation in one line: the present continuous is made from the present tense of the verb be and the -ing form of a verb.

The spelling of that -ing form carries four patterns worth putting on the board once rather than correcting twenty times.

What it is used for

LearnEnglish sets out the uses in order of level. At beginner level the form covers activities at the moment of speaking and future plans or arrangements. At intermediate level it adds something which is happening before and after a specific time, something which we think is temporary, something which is new and contrasts with a previous state, something which is changing, growing or developing and something which happens again and again. At advanced level it reaches the past, in telling a story and summarising a book, film or play.

Present continuous against present simple

This is the section most pages leave until last and it is the one that carries the meaning. Neither form means anything much on its own. Their meanings appear in the gap between them, and that gap is the lesson.

The present simple reference on LearnEnglish lists its own uses as something that is true in the present, something that happens regularly in the present and something that is always true, together with fixed future events and events after time words. Set those beside the continuous list above and the division is clear enough to teach from: the simple form states what is the case, the continuous form frames something as in progress and bounded.

The future use, and the boundary with going to

LearnEnglish gives the rule in five words: We can use the present continuous for plans or arrangements, with I’m playing football tomorrow as the example. The practical boundary with be going to is one of settledness. The LearnEnglish team puts it as the present continuous being used for something that has been arranged and is unlikely to change, while be going to is used for something which is still just an idea or intention and which may still change.

Three questions settle most classroom cases. Has it been arranged with somebody else. Is there a time or a place attached to it. Would changing it now require telling someone. Three yes answers point at the present continuous, and that test is faster to apply than any rule about certainty.

A worked classroom example

An A2 evening group of nine adults in Limerick, forty minutes in, the lesson nominally on daily routines and free time. The class has had the present simple for several weeks and met the present continuous in the previous lesson as the form for things happening now.

The teacher shows a photograph of a street market and asks what the people are doing. The answers come back well. She is buying fish. They are talking. A man is carrying a box. The form is sound, the pronunciation of the contractions is improving, and the stage looks like a success.

Then the teacher moves to a personalised stage and asks each learner about their week. A learner who has been in Ireland three months answers: I am wanting a new job because I am having two brothers here and I am knowing this city now.

The repair is cheap and it is structural rather than corrective. The board gets two columns, permanent and temporary, and the same five verbs are written into both. Learners decide which column each sentence belongs in before any form is practised. The stative set is then introduced not as a list of exceptions to memorise but as the verbs that have no temporary version, because a state does not start and stop.

The production stage that follows asks for three sentences about the learner’s own week, one permanent and two temporary, said to a partner who has to ask one follow up question. Without it the lesson has produced a table on the board and no English.

Common learner errors, by first language group

What the research supports, and what it does not

The ordering behind these errors is not random. The Aspect Hypothesis holds that learners attach tense and aspect morphology first to the verb types that match it semantically, so the progressive emerges with activity verbs before it spreads anywhere else. Bardovi-Harlig’s Tense and Aspect in Second Language Acquisition (2000) devotes a chapter to it and sets it in the wider literature on the emergence of verbal morphology.

Qian’s cross sectional study of 180 Chinese and Mongolian learners found the predicted association, with the progressive marking is strongly associated with Activities, and alongside it the error pattern above: both first language groups overextended progressive markings to states, which the study reads as transfer.

The hypothesis is not settled. Thane’s critical review argues that later work has questioned its generalisability, naming first language influence, syntactic similarity between the two languages and the pedagogical materials used in class as factors that may account for what the early studies found. Mueller’s artificial language experiment found no significant interaction between lexical aspect and morphological marking at the earliest stage of learning at all.

Two further limits are worth stating on a page like this.

• Metalinguistic knowledge is not processing. Roberts and Liszka found that advanced German and Dutch learners, matched with French learners on their explicit knowledge of English aspect, showed no aspect effect when reading in real time, while the French learners did. Knowing the rule and using the distinction under load are separate achievements.
• The form stays difficult late. Hinkel’s corpus analysis of 746 essays reports that even after many years of learning, advanced non native writers may still have difficulty with the conventionalised uses of tenses and aspects in academic writing. A class that gets the A2 contrast right has not finished with this form.

The defensible classroom claim is narrow. Teaching the present continuous against the present simple, with the stative restriction built into the presentation rather than bolted on afterwards, removes a known and predictable source of error. It does not make the form easy, and no page should promise that it does.

Sources and further reading

Every linked source below was opened and checked on 21 October 2026. Two print titles are cited bibliographically because no freely readable edition exists to link to.

Frequently asked questions

What is the present continuous tense?

It is the English verb form made with am, is or are plus the -ing form of a verb. It presents an action as in progress and bounded rather than as a completed fact, which covers an activity happening now, a situation the speaker treats as temporary, and a future arrangement that has already been fixed.

How do you form the present continuous?

Subject plus the correct form of be plus the verb with -ing. The negative puts not after be, as in she is not working. The question inverts the subject and be, as in is she working. The four spelling patterns for the -ing form cover most verbs: add -ing, drop a silent e, double a final consonant after one stressed short vowel, and change a final ie to y.

What is the difference between the present simple and the present continuous?

The present simple states what is the case, whether a fact, a habit or a permanent situation. The present continuous frames something as in progress and temporary. She works in a bakery describes her job. She is working in a bakery implies the arrangement has an end in view. The contrast is the meaning, which is why the two are best taught together.

Why can you not say I am knowing?

Because know is a stative verb, and the British Council’s reference says the continuous is not normally used with stative verbs. A state does not start and stop, so it has no in progress version. Some stative verbs can take the continuous, and when they do the meaning shifts from a state to behaviour, as in he is being rude.

Can the present continuous talk about the future?

Yes, and it is one of its two beginner uses. It is the form for arrangements that have already been fixed, usually with another person, a time or a place, as in we are meeting the landlord on Thursday. Be going to is used when the plan is still an intention that could change.

Is the present continuous the same as the present progressive?

Yes. They are two names for the same form. Continuous is the usual term in British coursebooks and progressive is more common in American materials and in research writing. The Cambridge TKT Glossary treats them as one aspect, naming it the continuous or progressive aspect.

Related terms in this glossary

• Past continuous tense, the same aspect moved into the past, where the contrast is with the past simple rather than the present simple.
• Present perfect tense, the other present form learners meet early, and the one most often confused with the continuous in writing about the recent past.
• Concept checking questions, the fastest way to find out whether a class has understood temporary rather than merely copied the form.
• The full TEFL teaching methods and classroom techniques glossary.

For what the qualification and career terminology behind classroom practice means, see TEFL qualifications and terminology explained on The TEFL Institute. For how much grammar and classroom technique a training course covers in Ireland and what employers ask for, see 120 hour versus Level 5 TEFL on The TEFL Institute of Ireland.

Last updated 21 October 2026. Written by Katie Troy for tefl.ai. All linked external sources were opened and checked on that date.

Where the term comes from

The word is borrowed from biology, where a cline is a gradual change in a characteristic across a population. Linguistics took it up to describe any gradual scale between two poles rather than a set of separate boxes. One of its early uses is in M. A. K. Halliday’s 1961 paper Categories of the Theory of Grammar, published in Word 17(2), pages 241 to 292, where it names a continuum along which grammatical categories shade into one another.

Language teaching uses the term more narrowly and more practically. The British Council’s TeachingEnglish defines a cline as a scale of language items that goes from one extreme to another, giving the example of a scale running from positive to negative, and notes that items may equally run from weak to strong or from frequent to rare.

The teaching sense is not in every reference work. The Cambridge TKT Glossary, which many trainee teachers treat as the standard list of method terminology, has no entry for it at all, and general dictionaries record only the non-linguistic meaning. That gap is worth knowing about: a cline is a working classroom tool with a long history in training rooms rather than a formally defined piece of assessment vocabulary.

How it is used in practice

A cline is drawn, not explained. The teacher puts a line on the board, labels the two ends, and the class decides where things sit between them. The drawing itself does most of the teaching, because it makes a relationship visible that a definition has to describe in words.

Four shapes are common.

1. Horizontal line. Two poles at the ends and words placed along it. The default, and the clearest for adjectives.
2. Vertical ladder. Strongest at the top. Useful for frequency and for quantity, where up and down carry obvious meaning.
3. Thermometer or arrow. A visual for young learners, where the shape itself suggests increase.
4. Two-ended with a marked middle. Used when the midpoint matters, for example a neutral position between like and dislike.

The language families that take a cline well are the gradable ones.

One point governs all of them. A cline needs gradable language. The British Council’s LearnEnglish describes gradable adjectives as those where we can have different levels of that quality, and separates them from absolute adjectives such as dead or impossible, which describe absolute qualities, and extreme adjectives such as amazing, awful and boiling. Absolute adjectives have no position on a scale. Extreme ones sit at the end of it and do not move.

A worked classroom example

An A2 group of eleven adults in Galway, a Tuesday evening, twenty minutes into a lesson on daily routines. Six frequency adverbs have come up in a reading text and the learners are using them interchangeably.

The teacher draws a vertical line on the board, writes 100 per cent at the top and 0 per cent at the bottom, and puts always and never in place. The other five words go on cards. Pairs decide an order, then one learner from each pair comes up and sticks a card where they think it belongs.

The board fills quickly and then stalls, because two pairs disagree about sometimes and often. One pair has sometimes above often. The class argues about it in English for two minutes, which is the most useful thing that happens in the lesson.

The teacher resolves it by anchoring rather than ruling. Often goes at roughly 70 per cent, sometimes at roughly 40, with the percentages written beside them and a short warning that these are rough and that speakers vary. Learners copy the finished scale into their notebooks.

The stage that matters comes next, and it is the one most often skipped. Learners write three true sentences about their own week using three adverbs from different points on the line, then compare in groups and ask one follow-up question each. Without that, the lesson has produced a diagram rather than any English.

Commonly confused with

What a cline can and cannot do

The case for the technique is straightforward. It is quick, it needs no materials, it gives learners something to disagree about in English, and it produces a record that can be copied into a notebook and used again. The British Council notes both of those uses, describing clines as a useful tool for learners to record information and as something a teacher can use as a concept check.

The honest limits are less often stated.

• A cline implies a precision that English does not have. The difference between often and usually is not a fixed quantity, and speakers vary. Percentages help learners fix an order, and they should be presented as a rough aid rather than a fact.
• Placing a word is not using a word. The British Council’s own entry carries this caveat directly: a learner who can complete a cline has not necessarily learned to use the target language in context. A cline belongs at the clarification stage of a lesson and needs a production stage after it.
• Only gradable language qualifies. Asking a class to order absolute or extreme adjectives produces an argument with no answer. Checking whether the items are gradable before the lesson is the single cheapest way to avoid that.
• It is a presentation device, not an evidenced method. Clines sit inside the broader practice of organising vocabulary visually, which has a reasonable research base. There is no body of evidence specific to clines themselves, and a page claiming otherwise is overstating what is known.

The defensible claim is modest and useful. A cline is the fastest way to make the relative strength of a set of words visible and checkable, and it earns its place in a lesson when a task afterwards makes learners use what the line showed them.

Sources and further reading

Every linked source below was opened and checked on 19 October 2026. The Halliday paper is a print journal article with no freely readable edition to link to, so it is cited bibliographically.

Frequently asked questions

What is a word cline in English teaching?

It is a scale drawn on the board on which words are arranged in order of degree, from one extreme to the other. Learners place the words themselves, which shows the teacher what each learner thinks the words mean and shows the class how a group of near synonyms differ in strength.

What is the difference between a cline and a lexical set?

A lexical set groups words that belong to the same topic, such as kitchen equipment or weather. A cline orders words along a single scale of degree. Words in a set have no ranking; words on a cline have nothing but ranking.

Which words can go on a cline?

Only gradable ones, meaning words that can be stronger or weaker. Frequency adverbs, quantifiers, gradable adjectives, modals of probability and verbs of liking all work well. Absolute words such as dead or unique have no degrees, and extreme words such as boiling or awful sit at the end of a scale rather than moving along it.

How do I use a cline as a concept check?

Draw the line, label the two ends, and give the words out on cards or ask learners to come and write them in. Where a learner puts a word is the answer to a concept question you never had to ask. It checks several items at once, which a spoken concept checking question cannot do.

Should I put percentages on a frequency cline?

They help, as long as they are presented as rough anchors rather than rules. Fixing often at about 70 per cent and sometimes at about 40 gives learners a stable order to remember. Saying plainly that speakers vary stops the numbers being copied down as facts.

Is a cline the same as a timeline?

No. Both are lines drawn on the board, which is why they are confused. A timeline shows when an event happens relative to the present and is used for teaching tense. A cline shows how much of a quality a word carries and is used for teaching meaning.

Related terms in this glossary

• Concept checking questions, the spoken form of the same job, and the technique a cline replaces when the items come as a set.
• Eliciting, the move that gets the words onto the board in the first place, since a cline works best when the class supplies the items.
• The full TEFL teaching methods and classroom techniques glossary.

For what the qualification and career terminology behind classroom practice means, see TEFL qualifications and terminology explained on The TEFL Institute. For how much classroom technique a training course actually covers in Ireland and what employers ask for, see 120 hour versus Level 5 TEFL on The TEFL Institute of Ireland.

Last updated 19 October 2026. Written by Katie Troy for tefl.ai. All linked external sources were opened and checked on that date.

Where the term comes from

The idea is older than the name. Maureen Lage, Glenn Platt and Michael Treglia described it in 2000 as the inverted classroom, writing that inverting the classroom means that events which have traditionally taken place inside the classroom now take place outside the classroom and vice versa. They were teaching introductory economics at Miami University and used recorded material so that contact time could be spent on application. In the same year, J. Wesley Baker presented a paper on what he called the classroom flip, which appears to be the first use of the word flip for this model.

The practice spread under the name it has now because of two chemistry teachers. In 2007, Jonathan Bergmann and Aaron Sams, at Woodland Park High School in Colorado, began recording their lessons with screen capture software for students who had missed class through sports travel. Students who had been present watched the recordings too, and the two teachers noticed that the recordings had quietly freed up the thing they had never had enough of, which was time with learners while the learners were working. Their 2012 book Flip Your Classroom: Reach Every Student in Every Class Every Day carried the model to a general audience. Bergmann and Sams have consistently declined the credit for inventing it, and they say there is no single right way to flip a class.

In March 2014 the Flipped Learning Network published a formal definition, which draws a line that matters.

What the evidence says

Effect sizes below are Hedges’ g, a standardised measure of the difference between a flipped group and a comparison group. Roughly, 0.2 is small, 0.5 is moderate and 0.8 is large.

Three things in that table are worth carrying into a staffroom conversation.

Language learning posts the largest effect, and the correction is large too. The headline figure of 0.99 is close to double anything found in general education, and the trim and fill correction cuts it by more than a third. The corrected figure of 0.58 is still a solid result. It is the gap between the two numbers that should make anyone cautious about the headline.

Where the effect came from is more useful than how big it was. van Alten and colleagues found that studies which shortened class time in the flipped condition produced significantly weaker results, and studies which added quizzes produced significantly stronger ones. Flipping is not a way to teach the same course in fewer contact hours. Taking the contact hours away removes the part that does the work.

Learners do not necessarily enjoy it more. Satisfaction was flat in the largest general meta-analysis. The model earns its keep in results, not in popularity, and learners who are used to being taught at often need the reason explained to them.

Vitta and Al-Hoorie also found that the effect rose with proficiency and was strongest for skill based, procedural outcomes such as writing. The weakest returns were in reading, vocabulary and standardised test performance.

How it is used in practice

In general education the flipped lesson is usually described as a recorded lecture followed by problem solving. Language teaching does not map onto that cleanly, because the in class activity most worth protecting is live interaction between people, which cannot be flipped at all. The useful question is therefore narrower: which parts of a language lesson lose nothing by being done alone, and at the learner’s own pace?

Writing for Cambridge, Philip Kerr sets out the usual answers, and they are consistent across schools that flip successfully.

• Grammar presentations. A recorded or interactive presentation can be paused and replayed, which a whiteboard explanation cannot. Guided discovery tasks on a course platform work particularly well here.
• First contact with new vocabulary. Matching meanings, working out meaning from context and digital flashcard practice all suit self pacing, and learners arrive ready to use the items rather than meet them.
• Reading and listening input. Re-reading, replaying and reaching for a dictionary are all easier at home, and mixed ability groups benefit most from being allowed the time they individually need.
• Brainstorming and first drafts of writing. The thinking happens alone, the shaping and feedback happen together.

What stays in the room is everything communicative: speaking, negotiation of meaning, error correction in the moment, pair and group work, and the feedback that depends on the teacher seeing the attempt as it is made.

Two practical conventions have settled around the pre class material. Videos work best at roughly four to eight minutes and should ask the learner to do something rather than only watch. And the following lesson must require the preparation, visibly and from the first minute, or a proportion of the class will quickly learn that it was optional.

A worked classroom example

A B2 general English evening class of eleven adults in Dublin, two ninety minute sessions a week. The target is the present perfect contrasted with the past simple, which this group has met before and still gets wrong. In a conventional lesson the teacher would spend twenty five minutes presenting the contrast and the class would reach controlled practice with twenty minutes left.

Before the lesson. Learners are sent a six minute guided discovery sequence: eight example sentences, four questions that make them work out the rule, and a short self marking check. It is set on the Sunday for the Tuesday class and takes about fifteen minutes.

The first ten minutes. The teacher does not re-present the rule. She puts four sentences on the board, two right and two wrong, and asks pairs to decide which is which and why. That is a concept check on the home study and a diagnostic at the same time, and it tells her within five minutes which learners understood the distinction and which only watched.

The remaining time. Personalised practice, a speaking task about experience and recent news, delayed correction on the board, and a short writing task that she can monitor while it is being written.

The second attempt fixed it with three small changes, none of which involved better video. The sequence was set with a deadline rather than a date, so the platform showed who had done it. The opening task was built so that an unprepared learner could not complete it and had to work with a partner who had. And the teacher spent two minutes at the end of the previous lesson saying what the preparation was for, which is the part most often skipped. Compliance went from seven out of eleven to ten.

Commonly confused with

What the evidence actually supports

The defensible claim is narrower than the enthusiasm around the model, and narrower than the 0.99 headline.

Flipping reliably helps when the time it releases is spent on structured application and when the input material is genuinely studied beforehand. Both halves of that sentence are load bearing. The meta-analytic record is clear that the in class redesign carries the effect, which is why van Alten and colleagues concluded that simply flipping before and during classroom activities might not be enough, and why Bergmann and Sams themselves wrote that the greatest benefit of a flipped classroom is not the videos but the in class time that every teacher must evaluate and redesign.

Three honest limits belong on any page about this term.

• Publication bias is unusually visible here. In the language learning meta-analysis, reports in non indexed journals found larger effects than indexed ones, and correcting for bias cut the overall figure from 0.99 to 0.58. The model works. It does not work as well as the most quoted number suggests.
• Most of the research is on young adults in formal education. It transfers reasonably to adult language schools and intensive courses. It transfers less obviously to one to one teaching, to very low level learners who cannot process input without support, and to contexts where learners have unreliable devices or connectivity.
• Compliance is the hidden variable. Studies rarely report how many learners actually did the preparation, and classroom experience says the figure is never one hundred percent. A model whose effect depends on preparation, measured in settings where preparation was probably better than average, will look better on paper than in a Tuesday evening class.

Sources and further reading

All linked sources were opened and checked on 16 October 2026. The remaining items are journal titles and books with no freely readable edition to link to, so they are cited bibliographically rather than linked.

Frequently asked questions

What is a flipped classroom in simple terms?

Learners meet the new material before the lesson, usually through a short video or reading, and the lesson itself is spent using it. The explanation that would normally take up the first part of a class happens at home, and the practice that would normally be set as homework happens in the room with the teacher available.

Is a flipped classroom the same as flipped learning?

No, and the Flipped Learning Network drew the line deliberately in 2014. Flipping a class is the logistical swap of input and application. Flipped learning is the fuller approach in which the freed class time is rebuilt around learners doing things, supported by a flexible environment, a learner centred culture, intentional content and a teacher who assesses continuously. Flipping can happen without flipped learning following from it.

Does the flipped classroom actually improve results?

On balance yes, modestly in general education and more strongly in language learning, but the size of the effect depends on design. The largest general meta-analysis found a small positive effect on assessed learning and no effect on satisfaction. A language specific meta-analysis found a large effect that shrank considerably once publication bias was corrected for. Studies that cut face to face time lost the advantage.

What should I flip in an English lesson, and what should I keep in class?

Flip grammar presentations, first contact with new vocabulary, reading and listening input, and the brainstorming or first draft stage of writing. Keep everything that depends on other people being present: speaking, pair and group work, negotiation of meaning, live error correction and feedback on performance as it happens.

What do I do when learners arrive without having watched the video?

Do not re-teach it, because that trains the whole class not to prepare. Build the opening task so that it uses the input rather than repeats it, pair an unprepared learner with a prepared one, and add a short self marking check to the pre class material so you know before the lesson who is missing. Setting a deadline rather than a date, and saying out loud at the end of the previous lesson what the preparation is for, both raise compliance more than better video does.

Do I need video to flip a class?

No. Video is the most common pre class format and the most visible one, but a reading, a set of examples with discovery questions, an interactive presentation on a course platform or a self marking exercise all do the same job. Bergmann and Sams warned against using video for its own sake, and the research found no significant difference between interventions that used video and those that did not.

Related terms in this glossary

• Guided discovery, the inductive presentation technique that makes the best pre class material, because it gives the learner something to do rather than something to watch.
• Backward design, the planning sequence that decides what the freed class time is actually for before any of it is timetabled.
• Concept checking questions, the quickest way to find out in the first five minutes who understood the material they studied at home.
• The full TEFL teaching methods and classroom techniques glossary.

For the qualification and career terminology that sits behind classroom practice, including what the main course types and acronyms mean, see TEFL qualifications and terminology explained on The TEFL Institute. For what Irish and UK employers actually ask for when they look at a teacher’s training, see 120 hour versus Level 5 TEFL on The TEFL Institute of Ireland.

Last updated 16 October 2026. Written by Katie Troy for tefl.ai. All linked external sources were opened and checked on that date.

Aspect, not a third past tense

Coursebooks often present the past perfect as a tense sitting one step further back than the past simple, as though English had a past, a further past and a further past still. The British Council’s LearnEnglish reference starts somewhere else entirely. It states that there are two tenses in English, past and present, and then lists four past tense forms: past simple, past continuous, past perfect and past perfect continuous. The past perfect is one of those forms, not a separate tense.
What it adds to the past tense is aspect. The Cambridge TKT Glossary defines aspect as a way of looking at verb forms without looking specifically at the time of the action or event, and states that there are two aspects in English, the continuous/progressive aspect and the perfect aspect. LearnEnglish describes what the perfect aspect does in a single phrase: it is used to look back from a specific time and talk about things up to that time.
That phrase is the whole form. The present perfect looks back from now. The past perfect looks back from a moment already in the past. Will with the perfect looks back from a moment in the future. The three are the same operation pointed at three different vantage points, and a class that has understood the present perfect has already done most of the work needed for this one.

The form

Two features of that table are worth a minute of board time rather than a footnote.

• The auxiliary never changes. Had serves every subject, which makes this one of the easiest English forms to produce accurately once the participle is known. The difficulty in this form is never the auxiliary.
• The contraction is ambiguous in speech. She’d left and She’d leave are both ‘d, one from had and one from would. Learners who cannot hear the difference are not failing at grammar, they are failing at a genuinely ambiguous signal, and the participle is the only thing that disambiguates it.

The participle is where the real load sits. The past perfect is the first form in most syllabuses that requires the third column of the irregular verb table rather than the second, and a learner who has been saying went for a year will say had went before they say had gone. That is a vocabulary problem wearing a grammar costume.

What it is used for

LearnEnglish lists four uses, and the pattern across them is consistent: in each one there is a point in the past from which the speaker is looking back.

The reference also notes that for and since work with this form exactly as they do with the present perfect: I was sorry when the factory closed. I had worked there for ten years. And it gives the one restriction on the continuous version: we do not normally use the past perfect continuous with stative verbs, with up until that moment, I’d never believed in astrology as the corrected example.

When it is not needed, which is most of the time

This is the section most pages leave out, and leaving it out is what produces the commonest error on the form.
If the past perfect simply meant the earlier of two past events, then every narrative told in order would require it throughout, because in a chronological story everything is earlier than everything that follows. English does not work that way. When events are told in the order they happened, the past simple carries the sequence on its own, and the past perfect is not used.
The British Council and BBC TeachingEnglish activity I couldn’t believe my eyes makes the point unusually directly. It builds a burglary story in the past perfect, then asks the class why that form rather than the past simple. The answer it gives is positional: the burglars’ actions all happen before this point in the past, the point being the moment the narrator arrives home. The activity then asks how could we tell the same story using only the simple past? and answers its own question: the burglars broke down the door. They stole the laptop etc. The teacher arrived home. And the reason for choosing the perfect version anyway is given as for dramatic effect, to make the story more interesting.

This also explains the familiar observation that the form is optional after before and after. Those conjunctions already state the order, so the verb form has nothing left to disambiguate. After she finished the report, she went home and after she had finished the report, she went home both work, and the second is a stylistic choice rather than a correction.

Past perfect against past simple and present perfect

The last pair is the one worth putting on the board, because it shows that this form is not decorative. In I ate when I got home and I had eaten when I got home the words are nearly identical and the two sentences describe different evenings. A learner who treats the past perfect as optional polish will produce the first and mean the second.

Backshift: reported speech, wishes and the third conditional

Beyond narrative, the past perfect does a second, more mechanical job. When a present perfect or past simple statement is reported from a past reporting verb, it shifts back into the past perfect. I have finished becomes he said he had finished. I saw her becomes he said he had seen her.
It carries the same backward step in unreal uses. LearnEnglish gives the past perfect for wishes for the past, as in I wish I had worked harder when I was at school, and for past hypotheses, as in suppose you hadn’t passed your exams. What would you have done?
Those uses usually arrive in a syllabus long after the narrative use, under different headings, which is why many learners meet the same form three times without noticing it is the same form. Naming it on each occasion costs nothing and saves a later lesson.

A worked classroom example

A B1 general English group of eleven adults in Galway, a Tuesday evening, the past perfect introduced for the first time. The teacher uses the burglary situation: comes in flustered, tells the class the house was broken into, and builds the scene. When I got home I realised I’d been burgled. They had broken the door. They had taken my laptop. They had eaten the cake.
The class reconstructs the list, the form goes on the board as had plus participle, and a controlled practice stage goes cleanly. Gap fills are nearly all correct. Participles are mostly right, with two instances of had went corrected on the spot. By the midpoint of the lesson the form looks learned.
The free stage asks each learner to tell a partner about a journey that went wrong. A learner who has been in Ireland for two years and is the strongest in the room says this:

I had arrived at the airport very early and I had checked in and then I had found a coffee shop and after that I had heard my name on the speaker and I had run to the gate.

The repair is not a correction and it is not a rule about frequency. It is one line added to the presentation: the past perfect appears when the story stops going forwards. The board gets the burglary story written out twice, once in strict order using only the past simple, and once as the teacher originally told it, starting with arriving home. Learners mark where the second version doubles back. The past perfects are all and only in the doubled-back part.
The production stage then asks for a two sentence story in which the second sentence explains something in the first. I couldn’t pay for the taxi. I had left my wallet at the office. Two sentences, one past simple and one past perfect, and the reason for the second form is visible in the pair. A learner who can produce that pair has the form. A learner who produces six in a row does not yet.

Common learner errors, by first language group

What the research supports, and what it does not

The claim that this form is rare is not an impression. Gavell, citing Biber, Leech, Conrad and Finegan’s corpus work, reports that perfects (overwhelmingly represented by the present perfect) make up only 5%-10% of spoken American English verb use, and that the present perfect is declining in frequency of use and has been doing so for centuries. The past perfect is a fraction of that fraction.
In learner production the numbers are starker. Chiravate’s analysis of written narratives from 120 Thai learners across five proficiency levels recorded pluperfect use at zero in the three lowest groups, and at under two per cent in the two highest, with consistently more use in the background of narratives than in the foreground. Long’s year long study of Japanese novice level monologues found the past perfect used once in the higher fluency group and never in the lower one, across six recording sessions.
Two findings worth taking seriously together. The form is rare in the input, and it is almost absent from learner output even after sustained instruction. The backgrounding pattern in Chiravate’s data also supports the argument made above: where learners do reach for it, they reach for it off the main narrative line.
The acquisition picture behind this is the Aspect Hypothesis, which holds that tense and aspect morphology attaches first to the verb types that match it semantically. Chan’s dissertation summarises it as the claim that acquisition and emergence of past tense and progressive morphology follow a semantic-driven, universal sequence, while reporting mounting evidence of transfer that complicates the universal part of it. That is the honest state of the literature: an ordering effect that is well attested, with first language influence sitting on top of it and not yet fully separated from it.

• Frequency is not difficulty. A form being rare does not mean it can be skipped. It means learners will meet it mostly in reading, which is an argument for teaching recognition thoroughly and production modestly, not for dropping it.
• Context beats rules. Deshors found that native and learner uses of past forms diverge in specific linguistic contexts rather than uniformly, which is an argument for teaching this form inside texts rather than in isolated sentences.

The defensible classroom claim is narrow. Presenting the past perfect as a signal of departure from chronological order, rather than as the earlier of two past events, removes a known and highly predictable source of overuse. It does not make the irregular participles easier, and it does not make a rare form frequent.

Sources and further reading

Every linked source below was opened and checked on 23 October 2026. Two print titles are cited bibliographically because no freely readable edition exists to link to.

Frequently asked questions

What is the past perfect tense?

The past perfect is the English verb form made with had plus a past participle. It looks back from a point already in the past to something earlier, as in she had left when we arrived. It is a form of the past tense carrying perfect aspect, not a separate tense of its own.

How do you form the past perfect?

Had plus the past participle, with no change for person or number. The negative is had not or hadn’t before the participle. The question puts had before the subject, as in had she left. The continuous version is had been plus the -ing form, as in it had been raining.

What is the difference between the past simple and the past perfect?

The past simple states that something happened. The past perfect states that it happened before another past event the speaker has already mentioned or has in view. The train left when we arrived means we saw it go. The train had left when we arrived means we missed it.

Do you always need the past perfect for an earlier event?

No, and this is the commonest misunderstanding. When a story is told in the order the events happened, the past simple carries the sequence by itself. The past perfect is needed when the telling departs from chronological order. After before and after it is usually optional, because those words already state the order.

What is the difference between the present perfect and the past perfect?

Both look back, and they differ only in where they look back from. The present perfect looks back from now, so she has lost her keys means she cannot get in at this moment. The past perfect looks back from a point in the past, so she had lost her keys describes the situation at that earlier moment.

Is the past perfect the same as the pluperfect?

Yes. Pluperfect is the traditional Latin derived name for the same form and is still used in grammars and in research writing. English language teaching materials almost always say past perfect, and the two terms refer to exactly the same had plus participle structure.

Related terms in this glossary

• Past simple tense, the form that carries a narrative told in order, and the one the past perfect is defined against.
• Present perfect tense, the same perfect aspect viewed from the present rather than from a point in the past.
• Past continuous tense, the other past form used to set a background, and the one most often paired with the past perfect in narrative lessons.
• The full TEFL teaching methods and classroom techniques glossary.

For what the qualification and career terminology behind classroom practice means, see TEFL qualifications and terminology explained on The TEFL Institute. For how much grammar and classroom technique a training course covers in Ireland and what employers ask for, see 120 hour versus Level 5 TEFL on The TEFL Institute of Ireland.

Last updated 23 October 2026. Written by Katie Troy for tefl.ai. All linked external sources were opened and checked on that date.

Where the pair comes from

The distinction became part of mainstream teacher training through Christopher Brumfit, whose Communicative Methodology in Language Teaching: The Roles of Fluency and Accuracy (1984) argued that a communicative course needs both kinds of work and that the two need separating in the timetable rather than blending.

Brumfit’s point was organisational as much as theoretical. Before it, communicative teaching was often read as an argument against attention to form at all. After it, the standard training answer was that a lesson contains accuracy stages and fluency stages, each with its own purpose, its own task design and its own correction policy.

The research literature usually treats the pair as part of a trio, written CAF: complexity, accuracy and fluency. Complexity is how elaborate the language a learner attempts is, accuracy is how target like it is, and fluency is how smoothly it is produced. Peter Skehan’s work in the late 1990s set out the influential version of the claim that these three compete for a learner’s limited attention, so a gain in one often shows up as a loss in another within the same performance.

What each term actually means

Both words are used loosely in staffrooms, and the loose use is where most of the confusion starts.

Fluency in language teaching is not the everyday sense of being fluent, meaning highly proficient overall. It is a quality of a single performance: speed, continuity and the absence of disruptive pausing and repair. A learner at B1 can speak fluently at B1, and a learner at C1 can be markedly disfluent in a stressful meeting.

Accuracy is conformity to the target form: grammar, vocabulary choice, pronunciation and register. It is not the same as caring about errors. An accuracy stage deliberately slows production down so that attention is available for form.

How the balance is used in practice

The pair earns its place because it answers a question teachers face several times a lesson: should I correct that.

1. Decide the stage before the lesson, not during it. Write accuracy or fluency next to each activity on the plan. The decision then makes itself in the room.
2. Tell the learners which one is in force. A class that is corrected in a discussion it believed was free talking learns to stop talking. One short sentence prevents that.
3. Keep a delayed correction slot. Record what you hear during the fluency stage, including good language, then put five or six items on the board afterwards and work through them with the class.
4. Repeat the task to get both. Giving learners the same task a second time, with less time, reliably improves fluency without the usual cost to accuracy, because the content is already planned and attention is freed.
5. Build in planning time. A few minutes to prepare before speaking tends to raise complexity and fluency. If accuracy is the target instead, tell learners explicitly to use the planning time to check their forms.

Two habits cause most of the trouble. The first is correcting everything, which produces a quiet class with tidy grammar and no capacity to use it. The second is correcting nothing, which is comfortable for everyone and lets errors become automatic.

A worked classroom example

A B1 class of twelve adults in Dublin, a double lesson on describing past experience. The teacher wants both jobs done and keeps them apart.

Accuracy stage, twenty minutes. The target is the past simple of irregular verbs. The learners do a controlled gap fill, then drill eight verbs chorally and individually. The teacher corrects every slip immediately, because an error that goes past here is an error the learner has just practised.

Fluency stage, twenty minutes. In pairs, learners tell each other about the worst journey they have ever had. Three minutes each, then swap partners and tell it again in two minutes. The teacher says nothing during the task, moves between pairs with a notebook, and writes down six things: four errors worth fixing and two good phrases worth praising.

Delayed correction, eight minutes. The six items go on the board unattributed. The class decides what is wrong and why, and the teacher supplies the two good phrases as models.

The honest caveat is that one lesson shaped this way changes very little. The balance is a property of a course over months, not of a single plan, and a page claiming otherwise is overselling it.

Commonly confused with

What the evidence actually supports

The trade off is real, and it is local. Under time pressure, attention given to form tends to cost smoothness, and attention given to getting the message out tends to cost correctness. This shows up within a single performance. It does not mean a learner who becomes more fluent over a term becomes less accurate over that term, and the two claims are often confused.

Task repetition is the best supported single technique. Repeating the same task improves fluency on the second attempt with little or no loss elsewhere, which is why it appears in so many teacher training handbooks.

Planning time moves the balance but not predictably. Pre task planning generally raises fluency and complexity. Its effect on accuracy depends on what learners are told to attend to, so the instruction matters as much as the time.

What is not settled. How far attention is a single limited pool, and therefore how strictly the trade off must hold, is still argued over. Measurement is also harder than it looks: fluency is usually operationalised as speech rate, pause length and repair frequency, and different studies weigh those differently, so figures are not always comparable.

Sources and further reading

The two linked pages below were opened and checked on 26 October 2026. The remaining items are books and journal articles with no freely readable edition to link to, so they are cited bibliographically rather than linked.

Frequently asked questions

What is the difference between fluency and accuracy?

Fluency is how smoothly and quickly a learner produces language, measured by speed, pausing and self repair. Accuracy is how closely that language matches the rules of the target form. Fluency is about flow and accuracy is about correctness, and a single activity usually asks for one of them rather than both.

Which matters more, fluency or accuracy?

Neither, and a course needs both. Training only accuracy produces learners who know the grammar and cannot use it in conversation. Training only fluency lets errors become automatic and hard to shift later. The practical answer is to decide which one each stage of a lesson is for, and to be consistent about correction within that stage.

Should I correct learners during a fluency activity?

Not in the moment. Note what you hear and deal with it after the task, because interrupting a learner mid message removes the condition the activity was designed to create. During an accuracy activity the opposite applies, and correction should be immediate, because the form is the point of the exercise.

What is an example of a fluency activity?

A three minute conversation on a familiar topic, repeated with a new partner in two minutes, is the standard example. Role plays, information gap tasks, storytelling and timed free writing all count. The defining features are that the learner chooses the language, there is a real outcome, and the teacher does not interrupt.

Does fluency mean being fluent in a language?

No, and the overlap of the words causes most of the confusion. Everyday use treats fluent as a synonym for highly proficient. In language teaching, fluency describes one quality of one performance, so a learner at an intermediate level can speak fluently within the range they have, and a very advanced speaker can be disfluent under pressure.

What is the accuracy and fluency trade off?

It is the finding that attention is limited, so within a single performance a learner who concentrates on getting forms right tends to speak less smoothly, and one who concentrates on getting the message out tends to make more errors. It describes what happens inside one task and not what happens to a learner over a course.

Related terms in this glossary

• Drilling, the standard accuracy technique, and the clearest example of a stage where immediate correction is right.
• Task-based learning, the approach that puts the fluency task first and takes the language focus from what learners needed to complete it.
• Recasting, the correction move most often used when a teacher wants to fix a form without stopping the flow.
• The full TEFL teaching methods and classroom techniques glossary.

For the qualification and career terminology behind classroom practice, see TEFL qualifications and terminology explained on The TEFL Institute. For what Irish employers ask for and how much practical teaching a course covers, see 120 hour versus Level 5 TEFL on The TEFL Institute of Ireland.

Last updated 26 October 2026. Written by Katie Troy for tefl.ai. All linked external sources were opened and checked on that date.

Where the technique comes from

The jigsaw was not invented for language teaching. Elliot Aronson and his graduate students built it in Austin, Texas, in 1971, after the city desegregated its schools and the classrooms that resulted were producing fist fights rather than friendships. Aronson’s team concluded, in their own words, that inter-group hostility was being fueled by the competitive environment of the classroom, and designed a structure that made pupils depend on one another instead.

The original method divides a unit into sections, gives each member of a group one section, sends learners with the same section off to an expert group to prepare it, and then returns them to teach it to their own group. Nobody can pass the test on their own, because the only route to the other sections is through the people who read them.

Language teaching borrowed the structure and applied it to a text. The British Council’s teaching knowledge database puts the adapted version plainly: A jigsaw listening or reading activity is an information gap exercise. That sentence is the whole technique. Everything else is logistics.

What makes it a jigsaw and not just group work

This is where most classroom versions of the activity go wrong, and it is worth being exact about.

The test is a single question, and it is worth asking of any activity before the photocopying starts: could a learner complete this task without listening to anybody. If the answer is yes, the speaking is decoration.

How it is run in practice

1. Pick a text that divides cleanly. Parallel structures work best: three cities, four opinions, five stages of a process. A tightly argued article that builds from paragraph to paragraph does not cut into independent pieces and should be left alone.
2. Cut it, and hand out one part per learner. Two parts is the standard pair version. Three or four parts needs groups and more time. Label the parts, because you will need to regroup by label in a minute.
3. Set the task before the reading, not after. Learners read with a purpose only if they know what they are reading for, and the purpose has to need the other sections. Ordering events, completing a table with one column per section and filling a gap in a timeline all work.
4. Let them read alone and in silence. This stage is individual. Allow notes but not full sentences copied out, because the point of the next stage is to say it rather than to read it back.
5. Regroup so that every part is represented once. With three sections, make groups of three, one A, one B, one C. The optional expert stage goes between: all the As meet first to agree what their section says, which lifts the weaker readers before they have to report.
6. Have them report, then complete the task together. Texts face down if you want the summarising to be real. The teacher circulates and listens rather than explaining.
7. Check as a class and give the whole text out at the end. Learners want to see what they missed, and the full text becomes homework or a later reading comprehension.

A worked classroom example

A B1 class of fifteen adults in Galway, a lesson on city transport. The text is a short article with three sections: a cycling scheme in Seville, a tram network in Bordeaux and a congestion charge in Stockholm. The task is a four-column table the class fills in together, with a final row that asks which city solved the most for the least money, which no single section answers.

Reading, eight minutes. Learners are As, Bs and Cs. Each reads one city, alone, and notes three facts: what was introduced, when, and what changed afterwards.

Expert groups, five minutes. All the As together, all the Bs, all the Cs. They compare notes and agree the three facts. A learner who misread a figure is corrected here, by a peer, before it reaches anyone who cannot check it.

Jigsaw groups, twelve minutes. New groups of three, one of each letter, texts face down. Each reports their city while the others fill in the table. The last row forces a comparison, so the group has to argue.

Feedback, five minutes. The table goes on the board, the class resolves the disagreements, and the full article is handed out.

Commonly confused with

What the evidence actually supports

Cooperative reading structures generally beat whole-class instruction. Pan and Wu’s study of seventy-eight EFL freshmen found statistically significant differences in favour of cooperative learning on reading comprehension, with the effect strongest among medium and low proficiency students, and a positive effect on motivation as well.

Jigsaw specifically has repeatedly shown gains, in small studies. Katemba and Samuel’s experiment with two grade eight classes in Bandung reported a significant difference in reading comprehension in favour of the jigsaw group. Shaaban’s earlier work with grade five EFL learners in Lebanon tested a jigsaw model against whole class instruction on comprehension, vocabulary and motivation to read.

The caveats are real and worth stating. Most of this literature consists of short classroom experiments with one or two intact classes, a few weeks of treatment and no follow up, which is enough to show a difference and not enough to size it. Comparisons are usually against conventional instruction rather than against another well designed group activity, so part of what is measured may be novelty and attention rather than the jigsaw structure itself.

What is not established. Whether the gain comes from the information gap, from the rehearsal in the expert group, from the obligation to explain, or simply from reading less text more carefully. Those four mechanisms are rarely separated, and a teacher deciding how to run the activity would benefit from knowing which one matters most.

Sources and further reading

The five linked sources below were opened and checked on 28 October 2026. The remaining items are books and a journal article with no freely readable edition to link to, so they are cited bibliographically rather than linked.

Frequently asked questions

What is jigsaw reading?

Jigsaw reading is a reading and speaking activity in which a text is split into sections, each learner or group reads only one section, and the learners then pool what they read to rebuild the whole text or answer questions none of them could answer alone. The British Council describes a jigsaw listening or reading activity as an information gap exercise, and that gap is the point of it.

How do you set up a jigsaw reading activity?

Choose a text that divides cleanly, cut it into two or more parts, and give each learner one part only. Set a task that cannot be completed from one part, such as ordering events or answering questions that span the whole text. Let learners read alone, then put them in groups where every part is represented and have them report to each other. Check the answer as a class afterwards.

What is the difference between jigsaw reading and reading in groups?

The information gap. In a jigsaw, each learner holds something the others need and cannot see, so talking is the only route to the answer. If everyone has the whole text in front of them, the speaking becomes optional and the activity collapses into reading with a discussion attached. The simplest test is whether a learner could finish the task without listening to anyone.

Where does the jigsaw technique come from?

Elliot Aronson and his graduate students invented the jigsaw classroom in Austin, Texas, in 1971, as a response to racial conflict in newly desegregated schools. Their conclusion was that inter-group hostility was being fuelled by the competitive environment of the classroom, so they built a structure in which each pupil held a piece the others needed. Language teaching borrowed the structure and applied it to texts.

What level is jigsaw reading suitable for?

It works from A2 upwards, provided the sections are short and the task is clear. The limiting factor is not reading level but the speaking demand, because learners have to summarise rather than read aloud. With lower levels, keep the sections to a few sentences, allow notes, and give the language needed to report, such as a frame for saying what happened first.

Can jigsaw reading be used for listening?

Yes, and the structure is identical: different groups hear different recordings and then combine what they heard. The British Council notes that managing a jigsaw listening exercise is more challenging because it needs separate playback, enough space for groups not to disturb each other, and more time. Most teachers meet the technique first through reading for that reason.

Related terms in this glossary

• Task-based learning, the approach a jigsaw sits most naturally inside, where the task comes first and the language focus follows from it.
• Concept checking questions, the technique for confirming that learners understood the instructions before a jigsaw starts, which is where this activity most often falls over.
• Guided discovery, the other main way of making learners do the work of arriving at the content rather than receiving it.
• The full TEFL teaching methods and classroom techniques glossary.

For the qualification and career terminology behind classroom practice, see TEFL qualifications and terminology explained on The TEFL Institute. For what Irish employers ask for and how much practical teaching a course covers, see 120 hour versus Level 5 TEFL on The TEFL Institute of Ireland.

Last updated 28 October 2026. Written by Katie Troy for tefl.ai. All linked external sources were opened and checked on that date.

Where the term comes from

The term belongs to Stephen Krashen, who set it out across Principles and Practice in Second Language Acquisition (1982) and The Input Hypothesis: Issues and Implications (1985). It is one of five linked hypotheses, usually called the Monitor Model, and it is the one that reached classrooms.

Krashen separated acquisition, the subconscious process by which a first language is picked up, from learning, the conscious study of rules. His position was that only acquisition produces fluent use, that acquisition is driven by understanding messages, and that conscious learning serves a narrow editing function at best. Comprehensible input is the fuel for the first process, and the second process cannot substitute for it.

The five hypotheses hang together, which matters when reading any one of them on its own.

The last row is the reason the two terms are almost always taught together. Comprehensible input describes what has to reach the learner, and the affective filter describes what can stop it arriving.

What i plus 1 actually claims

The notation is simpler than it looks. i stands for the learner’s current competence. The plus 1 is the next thing along in the natural order, the structure they are ready for but do not yet produce.

The claim is that learners do not need the plus 1 explained or practised. They need to meet it inside a message they can already follow, often enough, and the system does the rest. Meaning is carried by context, by what the learner already knows, by pictures, gesture, situation and the shape of the conversation. The grammar comes along for the ride.

Two things follow that teachers often find counterintuitive.

Input slightly above the level beats input exactly at the level. Material a learner understands completely contains nothing new to acquire. Material containing no new forms is comfortable practice rather than acquisition.

Rough tuning beats fine tuning. Krashen argued that a teacher should not try to target a specific structure at all. Provide enough understandable language on interesting topics and i plus 1 is covered automatically for every learner in a mixed class, each at their own i. This is why the hypothesis sits awkwardly with a grammar syllabus.

How it is used in practice

Making input comprehensible is a set of ordinary classroom moves rather than a method.

1. Grade the language, not the content. Simplify the words and the sentence shapes, keep the ideas adult. Talking down is a different thing from talking clearly.
2. Carry meaning outside the words. Pictures, objects, gesture, facial expression, board drawings, mime and a clear situation all do work that vocabulary would otherwise have to do.
3. Slow down and pause, do not raise your voice. Volume adds nothing. Pausing at phrase boundaries gives processing time, which is what is actually short.
4. Repeat without sounding repetitive. Say the same thing in two or three ways. Each version gives another route into the meaning.
5. Use reading as the main source. Krashen’s later work put extensive reading at the centre, on the grounds that a reader controls their own pace and gets far more input per hour than a listener in a class ever can.

Teachers should be clear about what this is not. Making input comprehensible is not the same as simplifying a text until nothing is unfamiliar. If every word is known, the plus 1 has been removed.

A worked classroom example

An A2 class of fourteen teenagers in Dublin, second lesson of a unit on daily routines. The teacher wants them to meet the present perfect, which is well beyond anything they produce.

She tells them about her weekend. She is holding a train ticket and a photograph.

Look. This is Galway. I have been to Galway three times. Three times. Once in June, once last year, and once last weekend. I have been there three times. She holds up three fingers, then the ticket, then the photograph.

Nobody is asked to produce the form. Nobody is told what it is called. The learners follow the story because the ticket, the photograph, the fingers and the place name carry it, and the new structure arrives inside something they already understand.

The honest caveat belongs here too. One encounter acquires nothing. The claim is about volume over months, not about a single well staged moment, and a page that implies otherwise is overselling the idea.

Commonly confused with

What the evidence actually supports

This is the term where a glossary has to be careful, because the idea is widely taught and the strong version of it is widely rejected.

What is not seriously disputed. Learners need large amounts of language they can understand. Input that cannot be understood does nothing. Comprehension supported by context, repetition and interest is a condition of acquisition in every current account. On this, Krashen won.

What is disputed. The sufficiency claim. Krashen held that comprehensible input plus a low affective filter is all that is required, and that output contributes nothing to acquisition directly. The strongest evidence against this came from Canadian French immersion, the same setting that produced much of the classroom research on correction. Those learners had years of comprehensible input and reached high levels of listening and reading comprehension, yet their spoken and written grammar remained markedly non target like on features that input alone had not fixed. Merrill Swain’s response, the comprehensible output hypothesis, argued that being pushed to produce language forces attention to form that comprehension allows learners to skip.

What is a theoretical objection rather than a classroom one. Kevin Gregg’s 1984 critique is the standard reference. His charge is that the hypotheses are not testable as stated: there is no independent way to establish what a given learner’s i is, so there is no way to identify i plus 1 in advance, and therefore no prediction that could fail. A teacher can use the idea productively without this mattering. A researcher cannot.

Three limits worth stating plainly, because pages on this term usually leave them off.

• i plus 1 cannot be measured. There is no test that returns a learner’s i. In practice teachers judge it by response, which is a reasonable craft skill and not an application of the formula.
• Nothing here licenses silence. The hypothesis says a silent period is natural and that production should not be forced. It does not say that learners who never produce will acquire the same grammar as learners who do, and the immersion evidence suggests they will not.
• The research base is older than the slogan. The hypothesis was formulated in the early 1980s. Most of what has been added since concerns the role of attention, noticing and interaction, all of which qualify it rather than confirm it.

The defensible summary is that comprehensible input is necessary and not sufficient. That sentence is uncontroversial among researchers and is a more useful thing for a teacher to hold than either the slogan or the dismissal.

Sources and further reading

The Council of Europe page below was opened and checked on 14 October 2026. The remaining items are books and journal articles with no freely readable edition to link to, so they are cited bibliographically rather than linked.

Frequently asked questions

What is comprehensible input in simple terms?

It is language a learner can follow even though parts of it are new. If a learner understands the message but not every word or ending, the input is comprehensible. If they understand everything, there is nothing new to acquire, and if they understand nothing, there is nothing to attach meaning to.

What does i plus 1 mean?

The i is the learner’s current level of competence and the plus 1 is the next step beyond it. Krashen’s claim is that learners move forward by understanding input containing i plus 1, with meaning supplied by context rather than by explanation. There is no test that measures a learner’s i, so the formula is a way of thinking rather than something to calculate.

Is comprehensible input enough on its own?

Most researchers say no. The necessity claim is widely accepted and the sufficiency claim is not. The clearest counterevidence comes from immersion programmes where learners received years of comprehensible input and still produced non target like grammar, which is what led Merrill Swain to argue that pushed output does a job comprehension does not.

How do I make my teacher talk comprehensible?

Grade the language rather than the content, pause at phrase boundaries instead of speaking louder, carry meaning through pictures, objects and gesture, and say important things in two or three different ways. Then check by watching responses rather than by asking whether everyone understood, because the answer to that question is almost always yes.

What is the difference between comprehensible input and immersion?

Immersion describes a programme in which subjects are taught through the target language. Comprehensible input describes a quality the language in that programme needs to have. An immersion setting delivers comprehensible input only if the teaching is adapted to what learners can follow, and when it is not, exposure alone produces far less than expected.

Does reading count as comprehensible input?

Yes, and Krashen’s later work argued it is the most efficient source. A reader sets their own pace, can reread, and meets far more language per hour than a listener in a class. Extensive reading at a level where the text is mostly understood is the clearest practical application of the hypothesis.

Related terms in this glossary

• Affective filter, the emotional barrier that stops comprehensible input being absorbed, and the hypothesis this one is always taught alongside.
• Interlanguage, the developing learner system that input feeds, and the place where the limits of input alone become visible.
• The full TEFL teaching methods and classroom techniques glossary.

For the wider picture of how immersion programmes are structured and what they ask of a teacher, see what English immersion is on The TEFL Institute, and for what the qualification and career terminology behind classroom practice means, see TEFL qualifications and terminology explained. For how much classroom methodology a training course covers in Ireland and what employers there expect, see 120 hour versus Level 5 TEFL on The TEFL Institute of Ireland.

Last updated 14 October 2026. Written by Katie Troy for tefl.ai. All linked external sources were opened and checked on that date.