Glossary of Teaching Terms

Teach a language, like others educational activities, may employ special vocabulary and words use. And the English Language is not the exception, there are a variety of terms that are useful in English Language courses. These are terms that every teacher who teaches a foreign language, in our case English language, must know; also, those who are studying to be teachers in the future, must know.

With these we can learn an “academic” concept of some words that we have probably heard in some explanation during the class or we found in some book when we study some topic based on the teaching a foreign language.

Some are as literal as their name, for example: Alphabet: the concept is “a complete standardized set of letter-basic written symbols-each of which roughly represent a phoneme of a spoken language.

This is an academic concept, but I believe that everyone have a established concept on what is Alphabet, maybe in our words it is “a set of letters or symbols that when spoken have an specific sound.

But, what happen with terms such Brainstorming? It is a group of activities where students freely contribute their ideas.

In my view, most of us probably did not know or had heard about them. Now, after having studied Didactic of the English Language, we are already familiar with them, we have the knowledge about some terms, but not all of them, and we need to know every one because they will and are part of us as future teachers teaching a foreign language.

There are a lot of teaching terms end each one has their own meaning. But, rather than memorizing them from head to toe is better to understand the meaning or assorted them with key words that facilitate the assimilation of them, so will keep them in our minds in the future, also we will never forget them.

Why should we know the teaching terms?

The reason is because these are useful and necessary for us, who are studying to be an English teacher in the future. Also, is probably that in three of five subjects a teacher will mention them, and if we do not know the meaning of these, we will be lost about what they have explained in the moment, or if we look into information in some books we can also find it.

Also, through our career we will make use of these.

Just imagine, you are an English teacher in a future, and you are in a teacher council meeting, discussing the deficiencies that learners have regard “phoneme awareness”, but you do not know which is the meaning of these words because you were never interested in learn them, or did not put attention when the teacher explained each one.

How can you expose your opinions?

You will have to ask about a meaning or idea that can help you understand, which might be embarrassing to you, but is the result of not showing interest to the teaching terms. As future teachers, whose purpose is provide a good education and, we must be familiar with the use of the teaching terms.