Eliciting is the set of techniques a teacher uses to draw language, ideas or knowledge out of learners rather than presenting it to them. The teacher supplies a prompt, usually a picture, a context or a question, and the learners supply the answer. It is both a teaching technique and a diagnostic one.
The short version
Eliciting reverses who does the talking at the moment new language appears. Instead of writing the word on the board and explaining it, the teacher builds a situation the word belongs in and asks the class to supply it. What comes back is the language, and also a free reading of what the class already knows.
Part of the TEFL teaching methods and classroom techniques glossary.
The British Council’s guidance sets out three premises behind the technique: that a class collectively holds a great deal of language and world knowledge which needs activating, that new knowledge is usually built on what learners already have, and that questioning assists in self discovery, which makes information more memorable. The same guidance quotes the definition given in the Dictionary of Language Teaching and Applied Linguistics, “Techniques or procedures which a teacher uses to get learners to actively produce speech or writing”, and notes that this is wider than vocabulary alone.
That width is the part most trainees miss. A teacher can elicit vocabulary and grammatical form, and can just as usefully elicit ideas, feelings, situations, associations and memories. The British Council’s teaching knowledge database entry describes elicitation as a learner centred technique for teaching grammar and vocabulary, with the first conditional as its worked example: the teacher puts examples on the board and writes “We make the first conditional in English with…?” rather than stating the rule.
| What is elicited | The prompt that works | Where in the lesson |
|---|---|---|
| Vocabulary | A picture, a mime, a definition, a gapped sentence, an opposite already on the board | Pre-teaching before a text, or at the point of need |
| Grammatical form and rule | Two or three example sentences on the board and an unfinished statement of the pattern | The presentation stage, or the language focus after a task |
| Meaning and use | A short dialogue or text, then closed questions about time, certainty and speaker intention | Immediately after form, combined with concept checking |
| Topic knowledge and ideas | A photograph, a headline, a short anecdote from the teacher, a video still | Lead in to a reading or listening lesson |
| Pronunciation | The written word plus a request for stress placement, or a mouth shape the class copies | With the item, not in a separate lesson |
| What the class already knows | A mind map or a know, want to know, learnt chart built on the board | The start of anything, and again at the end as a record |
The diagnostic use is the one worth protecting. Eliciting tells a teacher what the learners know or do not know before the plan is committed to, which makes it the cheapest form of assessment available and a natural companion to needs analysis. A teacher who elicits at the top of a lesson and finds the class already has the target language has saved twenty minutes and learned something a lesson plan could not have told them.
A B1 class of fourteen adults, a reading text about commuting, and one item the text depends on: exhausted. The teacher has ninety seconds to get it into the room. The sequence below is the one that works, and the column on the right is what makes it work.
| Move | What is said or shown | Why this move and not another |
|---|---|---|
| 1. Build the situation | “It is Friday. I got up at five. I worked eleven hours. I got home at nine. How do I feel?” | Context first. Without it the question is a guessing game and the class stays silent |
| 2. Accept the near miss | A learner offers “tired”. Teacher: “Yes, tired. Very, very tired. Is there a stronger word?” | The near miss is the ladder. Rejecting it costs the volunteer and the next three |
| 3. Narrow the prompt | Teacher writes “I am completely ex_______” on the board and waits | Input is required. Eliciting is not an excuse for withholding, it is staged giving |
| 4. Take it and check it | “Exhausted, good. Am I a little tired or very tired? Can I work now? Yes or no?” | The eliciting produced the word. The concept questions confirm the meaning landed |
| 5. Hand it back | “Where is the stress? Say it. Now tell your partner about the last time you felt it” | Pronunciation and personalisation in one move, and the teacher stops talking |
Two things make the difference between this and the version that dies. The first is that the situation comes before the question. The second is step three: the teacher had a narrowing prompt ready and used it after one exchange rather than asking the same question four more times in a hopeful voice. The British Council’s own advice is blunt about this, warning teachers not to “pull teeth” and to treat prolonged silence or wrong answers as a signal that input is required.
| Eliciting is not | The difference |
|---|---|
| Socratic questioning | The British Council draws this line explicitly. Eliciting is designed to find out what the learners know. Socratic questioning leads them to a conclusion only the teacher holds. The shapes look identical and the purposes are opposite. |
| Concept checking questions | Eliciting comes first and gets the item into the room. Concept checking comes after and tests whether the meaning is secure. A lesson that only elicits never confirms; one that only concept checks had to present the language itself. |
| Drilling | Drilling repeats a form the teacher has supplied, to build accuracy and confidence. Eliciting asks the learners to supply it. They sit next to each other in a lesson and answer different questions. |
| Guided discovery | Guided discovery is a whole lesson shape in which learners work out a rule from data, usually on a worksheet and usually in pairs. Eliciting is a single move, lasting seconds, which that shape uses repeatedly. |
| Brainstorming | Brainstorming gathers quantity with no target in mind. Eliciting is usually aimed at a specific item the lesson needs next. A lead in brainstorm is one kind of eliciting; most eliciting is not a brainstorm. |
| Display questions in general | A display question asks for information the teacher already has, and classroom research has long counted them as the dominant question type. Eliciting uses display questions deliberately and briefly. Asking them all lesson is not eliciting, it is interrogation. |
The first two rows account for most of the confusion on teacher training courses. A trainee told to elicit more and concept check more frequently does both at once, producing a question that neither draws out language nor tests meaning. Keeping the two moves in order, elicit then check, fixes it in a lesson.
Eliciting is old enough that nobody owns it, but its analytical home is the study of classroom discourse. Sinclair and Coulthard’s 1975 description of the English used by teachers and pupils named elicitation as a class of act within the three part exchange of initiation, response and feedback, which is still the standard way of describing what happens when a teacher asks and a class answers. Long and Sato later separated display questions, which ask for what the teacher already knows, from referential questions, which ask for what the teacher does not, and found classroom talk dominated by the first. Brock’s 1986 study in TESOL Quarterly then showed that raising the proportion of referential questions produced longer and syntactically more complex learner responses.
The practical reading of that literature is not that display questions are bad. Eliciting a known word from a class is a display question and it works. The reading is that a lesson made entirely of them limits what learners produce, which is why eliciting belongs alongside referential work rather than replacing it.
The caveat that matters most in an international classroom is cultural, and the British Council states it plainly. An open invitation such as “Who can tell me something about…?” is met with silence in many settings, and the learners are then wrongly labelled as ignorant or shy when the reason is that volunteering information, or standing out from the group either as a success or a failure, is not done. The recommended corrections are practical: nominate rather than wait for volunteers, so that no learner chooses to stand out; give thinking time, and allow an answer to be written down first; ask questions with no right answer at the lead in stage; and encourage rather than correct, because confidence and not accuracy is what is being built at that moment.
The other reason to elicit is arithmetical. Every answer a learner supplies is an answer the teacher did not have to say, which is why the technique is the fastest available lever on teacher talking time and student talking time, and why it appears in the presentation stage of almost every presentation, practice, production lesson a trainee is asked to plan.
The two linked sources below were fetched and confirmed live on 21 September 2026. The rest are cited bibliographically without a link, because this site does not publish links it has not checked.
| Source | Reference | What it contributes |
|---|---|---|
| British Council, TeachingEnglish | ‘Eliciting’, first published 2009, updated 2025. Read it at TeachingEnglish. | The fullest practitioner account: the three premises, the tools, the classroom dialogues, the cultural caveat and the distinction from Socratic questioning. |
| British Council, Teaching Knowledge Database | ‘Elicitation’. Read it at TeachingEnglish. | The short reference definition, the first conditional example, and the three stated reasons the technique is used. |
| Richards, J. C. and Schmidt, R. | Longman Dictionary of Language Teaching and Applied Linguistics. Harlow: Pearson Education. | The standard reference definition quoted above: techniques or procedures a teacher uses to get learners to actively produce speech or writing. |
| Sinclair, J. McH. and Coulthard, R. M. (1975) | Towards an Analysis of Discourse: The English Used by Teachers and Pupils. London: Oxford University Press. | Names elicitation as a class of act inside the initiation, response and feedback exchange. The analytical origin of the term as used in classroom research. |
| Long, M. H. and Sato, C. J. (1983) | ‘Classroom Foreigner Talk Discourse: Forms and Functions of Teachers’ Questions’, in Seliger, H. W. and Long, M. H. (eds.) Classroom Oriented Research in Second Language Acquisition. Rowley, MA: Newbury House. | The display and referential question distinction, and the finding that classroom talk is dominated by questions whose answers the teacher already has. |
| Brock, C. A. (1986) | ‘The Effects of Referential Questions on ESL Classroom Discourse’, TESOL Quarterly 20(1), pp. 47 to 59. | The evidence that referential questions produce longer and syntactically more complex learner responses than display questions do. |
| Scrivener, J. (2011) | Learning Teaching: The Essential Guide to English Language Teaching. 3rd edn. Oxford: Macmillan Education. | The standard teacher training treatment of eliciting as a classroom move, alongside concept checking and guided discovery. |
| Harmer, J. (2015) | The Practice of English Language Teaching. 5th edn. Harlow: Pearson Education. | Places eliciting within the wider question of teacher roles and the balance of teacher and learner talk in a communicative classroom. |
| Doff, A. (1988) | Teach English: A Training Course for Teachers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. | The training course treatment of eliciting and of prompting, written for teachers working with large classes and limited materials. |
In the classroom
Eliciting means drawing language, ideas or knowledge out of learners instead of presenting it to them. The teacher provides a prompt, such as a picture, a situation or a gapped sentence, and the class supplies the word, the rule or the idea. It is used to make learning more memorable, to keep the classroom learner centred, and to find out what a group already knows before teaching it something it does not need.
They run in sequence and do different jobs. Eliciting gets the item into the room by asking the learners to produce it. Concept checking questions come afterwards and test whether the meaning has actually landed, usually through short closed questions with yes or no answers. If you elicit and never check, you have the word without knowing it is understood. If you only check, something else had to supply the word first.
No, and the British Council draws the line directly. Eliciting is designed to find out what learners know. Socratic questioning is designed to lead learners to a conclusion which only the teacher holds. The two can look identical from the back of the room, because both consist of a teacher asking a series of questions, but the purposes point in opposite directions and so does what the teacher does with an unexpected answer.
Mechanically. Every item a learner supplies is an item the teacher did not explain, and the explanation is usually the longest turn in the exchange. The effect is not only arithmetical: a class that expects to be asked stays alert in a way a class that expects to be told does not. Eliciting is the most reliable single adjustment a teacher can make to the balance of talk in a lesson.
Give input rather than repeating the question. Prolonged silence usually means the context was thin, the question was too open for the level, or volunteering is not something this group does. Narrow the prompt, nominate a learner by name, allow thinking or writing time, or simply supply the item and move on. The British Council’s advice is not to pull teeth: an elicitation that has failed twice has told you something useful and should be ended.
Yes, with tighter questions. At lower levels open ended questions should be avoided, because learners are unlikely to have the language to answer them to their own satisfaction, and the attempt produces frustration rather than production. Guided questioning works instead: yes or no questions, choices between two options, gapped sentences on the board and heavy visual support. Learners can also elicit from each other, which shifts attention away from the teacher and builds confidence.
Next in the glossary: teacher talking time and student talking time, which is the measure eliciting moves, and presentation, practice, production, where eliciting does most of its work in the first stage. The full TEFL teaching methods and classroom techniques glossary holds every entry. For the qualifications and career terminology that sits alongside the teaching vocabulary, see the Institute’s TEFL qualifications and terminology explained. Teachers preparing for interview in Ireland will find this asked directly in common TEFL interview questions and answers, where “how would you teach grammar” is normally answered by eliciting the rule from examples rather than stating it.
How to cite this definition
tefl.ai (2026) ‘Eliciting’, TEFL Teaching Methods and Classroom Techniques: A Teacher’s Glossary. Available at: https://tefl.ai/eliciting/ (Accessed: 21 September 2026).
Last updated: 21 September 2026 · Written by: Katie Troy, tefl.ai · Review cycle: definitions are re-checked against their cited sources every six months.
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