TEFL teaching methods are the overall frameworks that shape how a language course is taught, such as communicative language teaching, task-based learning and the lexical approach, while classroom techniques are the specific moves a teacher makes inside a lesson, such as scaffolding, drilling and eliciting. This glossary defines the twenty terms that recur most often in TEFL training and classroom observation.
If you want these methods taught in sequence rather than looked up one at a time, the 120-hour Advanced International TEFL course covers lesson planning, classroom management and teaching methodology across ten modules.
The short version
Four things worth knowing before you read the entries
The twenty entries below are grouped into four families: the methods that shape a whole course, the techniques used inside a lesson, the concepts behind assessment and course design, and the ideas that explain how a learner’s English actually develops. Each entry opens with a self-contained definition and follows it with what the term means when you are standing in front of a class, because the gap between those two things is where most TEFL training founders.
Terms are defined here as they are used in English language teaching specifically. Several of them, including scaffolding, differentiation, formative assessment and backward design, come from general education and carry slightly different weight in a language classroom, and the entries say so where it matters.
The big-picture frameworks that decide how a whole course is shaped.
Also written: CLT
Communicative Language Teaching is an approach that treats communication as both the goal of language learning and the means of achieving it. Lessons are built around meaningful interaction, information gaps and authentic tasks rather than isolated grammar drills, and accuracy is developed through use rather than demanded before it.
In practice, CLT is less a fixed lesson shape than a test you apply to your own materials: does the activity give learners a reason to speak that is not simply “because the teacher asked”? An information gap, a genuine opinion split or a decision the group has to reach will all pass that test. A substitution table will not.
Also written: TBLT, task-based language teaching
Task-Based Learning organises teaching around tasks with a real outcome rather than around language items. Learners attempt the task first, then examine the language they needed to complete it. The syllabus is a sequence of tasks, and grammar is addressed after use rather than presented in advance.
A task-based lesson runs pre-task, task, planning, report, then language focus. The order matters: learners meet the gap in their own English before the teacher fills it, which is what makes the language focus feel necessary rather than arbitrary. Willis (1996) and Ellis (2003) are the standard references.
Full entry: task-based learning, with the six lesson stages and a worked classroom example
Also written: lexis-based teaching
The Lexical Approach holds that language consists of grammaticalised lexis rather than lexicalised grammar. Teaching therefore centres on chunks, meaning collocations and fixed or semi-fixed expressions, on the grounds that fluent speech is largely assembled from prefabricated units rather than generated word by word from rules.
The classroom consequence is that you record heavy rain, make a decision and I’d rather not as single items, not as a noun plus an adjective to be combined later. Michael Lewis set this out in The Lexical Approach (1993); Nation (2013) supplies the vocabulary-acquisition evidence underneath it.
Also written: PPP
Presentation-Practice-Production is a three-stage lesson shape in which the teacher presents a target language item, learners practise it in controlled exercises, and then produce it more freely. It is widely used in initial teacher training for its clarity, and widely criticised for assuming acquisition follows the same order.
PPP is genuinely useful when the target is small, discrete and new: a single functional phrase, a pronunciation feature, one tense contrast. It struggles when the target is a broad skill, because the production stage tends to reproduce the presented item rather than generate real use.
Full entry: presentation, practice, production, with the three stages and a worked classroom example
Also written: TPR
Total Physical Response is a method in which learners respond physically to spoken commands before being asked to speak themselves. Developed by James Asher, it mirrors the way children act on instructions long before producing sentences, and it delays production until learners are ready rather than forcing it early.
TPR earns its place with beginners, young learners, and concrete vocabulary: verbs of movement, classroom objects, prepositions of place. It runs out of road with abstract language, which is why it works best as one stage in a lesson rather than a whole methodology.
What a teacher actually does, minute to minute, in the room.
Also written: instructional scaffolding
Scaffolding is temporary, deliberately withdrawn support that lets a learner do something they could not yet manage alone. The term comes from Wood, Bruner and Ross (1976) and rests on Vygotsky’s zone of proximal development. The defining feature is removal: support that never fades is not scaffolding.
Scaffolding is a sentence starter you take away next lesson, a model you stop providing, a partner stage you eventually drop. If the same prompt is still on the board in week ten, it has stopped being scaffolding and become a permanent crutch, which is useful to notice, because that is the most common way the technique quietly fails.
Also written: repetition drills
Drilling is controlled repetition of a target form to build accuracy and automaticity. Choral drills involve the whole class, individual drills a single learner, and substitution drills change one element each time. Drilling shapes pronunciation and fluency of form; it does not by itself produce the ability to communicate.
The useful discipline is to drill the thing learners actually find hard, usually the stress pattern or the weak form, not the whole sentence. Drill it, then immediately put it into a task where meaning matters, or it stays a noise the class can make on command and nowhere else.
Full entry: drilling, with the six types of drill and a worked classroom example
Also written: elicitation
Eliciting is a technique in which the teacher draws language, ideas or answers out of learners instead of supplying them. It reveals what a class already knows, raises engagement and reduces teacher talking time, but it wastes time when the target item is genuinely unknown and simply cannot be produced.
The judgement call is how long to wait. Eliciting a word the class has met before is efficient; eliciting one they have never seen is a guessing game with the teacher as the only person who knows the rules. When two attempts produce nothing, tell them.
Also written: CCQ, concept questions, concept checking
A concept checking question is a short question a teacher asks to confirm that learners have understood the meaning of a new word, phrase or structure, rather than asking them whether they understand. A good one uses simpler language than the target item, avoids containing the target item, and expects a brief answer.
The technique exists because asking a class whether something is clear produces a polite yes from learners who understand and from learners who do not. Two or three small questions about the situation separate the two groups in under a minute, which is the cheapest moment to find out.
Full entry: concept checking questions, with a four step method and how CCQs differ from ICQs
Also written: guided discovery learning, inductive teaching, the discovery approach
Guided discovery is an inductive teaching technique in which the teacher presents learners with examples of a target language item and then leads them, through questions and tasks, to work out the rule for themselves before any explanation is given. The teacher directs the route; the learners state the rule.
The word doing the work is guided. The teacher chooses the examples, writes the questions and knows in advance which rule the class is meant to reach, which is what separates the technique from leaving learners to explore on their own.
Also written: TTT, STT
Teacher talking time is the proportion of classroom time the teacher speaks; student talking time is the proportion learners speak. The aim is not to minimise teacher talk but to make it purposeful: instructions, modelling and feedback are valuable, while extended unplanned explanation displaces the practice learners need.
A useful audit is to record ten minutes of your own lesson and mark each stretch of teacher talk as instruction, model, feedback or filler. Most teachers find the total is fine and the proportion of filler is the problem, which is a far more fixable finding than “talk less”.
Also written: differentiated instruction
Differentiation is adjusting content, process, product or support so that learners at different levels can work towards the same objective in one class. In language teaching it more often means varying the demand of a task or the amount of support given than setting different learners entirely different work.
In a mixed-level class, the practical unit of differentiation is usually the same text with three levels of task, or the same task with three levels of scaffolding. Tomlinson’s work on the differentiated classroom is the standard reference; the ELT-specific skill is choosing which of the four levers to pull.
Also written: staged reading
Scaffolded reading is a staged approach to a text in which support is front-loaded and then withdrawn: pre-teaching a small number of blocking words, setting a gist task, then moving to closer comprehension and inference work. The text stays constant while the demand placed on the learner rises.
The common error is pre-teaching too much vocabulary, which removes the reading challenge before it starts. Pre-teach only the words that block comprehension of the whole text; leave the rest to be inferred, because inferring from context is the skill the lesson is supposed to build.
Also written: recasts, corrective feedback
Error correction is any teacher response signalling that a learner’s language was not target-like. A recast is one type: the teacher reformulates the utterance correctly without interrupting the flow of meaning. Recasts are unobtrusive but frequently go unnoticed by learners, which limits how much they change.
Lyster and Ranta (1997) found recasts were the most common form of corrective feedback and among the least likely to produce learner uptake. The practical implication is not to abandon recasts but to pair them with something that requires a response, such as a clarification request or an elicitation of the correct form.
How learning is measured, and how a course is planned backwards from it.
Also written: formative assessment, summative assessment
Formative assessment happens during learning and feeds back into teaching: concept checking, drafts, exit tickets. Summative assessment happens at the end and reports achievement: a final exam, a placement test, a certificate. The distinction is purpose, not format: the same task can serve either function.
Because the difference is purpose, a progress test becomes formative the moment you use its results to change next week’s lesson, and stays summative if you only record the mark. That is why the question “is this formative or summative?” is better asked as “what will I do with the result?”
Also written: backwash
Washback is the influence a test exerts on the teaching and learning that comes before it. It is positive when exam preparation drives genuinely useful language work, and negative when it narrows a course to test technique. The concept is standard in the language-testing literature.
Alderson and Wall (1993) asked whether washback exists at all, and concluded the effect is real but far less automatic than assumed, because teachers mediate it. For a course that ends in an exam, the design question is which parts of the test are worth teaching towards and which are merely worth practising.
Full entry: washback, with positive and negative washback compared in a worked exam class
Also written: understanding by design, UbD
Backward design is a planning sequence that starts with the desired learning outcome, then decides what evidence would show it has been achieved, and only then plans the lessons. Popularised by Wiggins and McTighe, it reverses planning that starts from activities or from the next page of the coursebook.
The three stages are: identify desired results, determine acceptable evidence, plan learning experiences. Applied to a language course, stage two is usually the one that gets skipped, and skipping it is how a syllabus ends up full of good activities that nobody can say learners have learned from.
Full entry: backward design, with the three stages and a worked six week course
Also written: needs assessment
Needs analysis is the systematic gathering of information about what learners must be able to do in English, in order to set course objectives. It distinguishes target needs, meaning the language demanded by the learner’s real situation, from learning needs, which describe how that particular group learns best.
Hutchinson and Waters (1987) drew the target-needs and learning-needs distinction that most ESP course design still uses. For a business or exam class, a needs analysis run in week one is worth more than any amount of coursebook selection done in advance.
Full entry: needs analysis, with the four strands and a worked week one example
Also written: reflective teaching
Reflective practice is the disciplined habit of examining one’s own teaching against evidence in order to change it. It requires a record of some kind, such as notes, recordings, peer observation or learner feedback, because unaided recall of a lesson reliably reconstructs what the teacher intended rather than what actually happened.
Schön’s distinction between reflection-in-action (adjusting mid-lesson) and reflection-on-action (reviewing afterwards) is the useful one. The habit that makes it stick is small and dull: three lines after each lesson on what learners found hard, written before you leave the room.
The concepts that explain what is happening inside the learner.
Also written: affective filter hypothesis
The affective filter is a hypothesised emotional barrier that stops comprehensible input from becoming acquired language. Proposed by Stephen Krashen, it holds that anxiety, low motivation and low self-confidence raise the filter, so input reaches the learner but is not absorbed. It explains why a stressed class learns less.
Whatever one makes of Krashen’s wider model, the classroom implication has held up well: the same lesson delivered to an anxious group and a relaxed one produces different learning. Lowering the filter is why pair work precedes whole-class production, and why correcting every error during a fluency stage is counterproductive.
Full entry: the affective filter, with a worked classroom example and the evidence
Also written: learner language
Interlanguage is the learner’s own developing language system, distinct from both their first language and the target language, and governed by rules of its own. Named by Larry Selinker in 1972, the concept reframes learner errors as evidence of a systematic grammar in progress rather than simple failure.
Interlanguage is why a learner who has just met the past simple starts producing goed and buyed, forms they have never heard. That is not deterioration; it is a rule being over-applied, which means the rule has been learned. Selinker’s related idea of fossilisation describes what happens when the system stops developing.
Full entry: interlanguage, with a worked classroom example and the evidence
Also written: negative transfer, mother-tongue interference
L1 interference is the influence of a learner’s first language on their English, also called negative transfer. It produces predictable errors in sound, word order, article use and false friends. Interference explains why errors cluster by nationality, and why knowing a group’s L1 lets a teacher anticipate them.
Transfer is not only negative: where the two languages align, the L1 helps. The teaching value of the concept is predictive: if you know your class is Spanish-speaking, you can plan for people is and for the missing initial /s/ cluster before anyone produces them.
Full entry: L1 interference, with a worked classroom example and the evidence
These are the distinctions that come up most often in teacher training and in observation feedback. In each case the two terms are related, which is exactly why they get swapped.
| Pair | The first term | The second term | How to keep them apart |
|---|---|---|---|
| Scaffolding vs differentiation | Support that is temporary and withdrawn as the learner improves. | Adjusting task, support or outcome so different learners can meet the same objective. | Scaffolding is about time; differentiation is about spread. You scaffold one learner across weeks; you differentiate one class within a lesson. |
| PPP vs task-based learning | Language is presented first, then practised, then produced. | The task comes first; the language focus follows from what learners needed. | The difference is the order, and the order is the whole argument. PPP assumes you can predict the language; TBL assumes you find out. |
| Formative vs summative assessment | Runs during learning and changes the teaching. | Runs at the end and reports the achievement. | The same test can be either. What decides it is whether the result changes what you teach next. |
| Drilling vs eliciting | The teacher supplies a form and learners repeat it. | The teacher withholds and learners supply it. | Opposite directions of travel. Drill what learners can already understand but not yet say; elicit what they can already say but have not yet retrieved. |
| Error correction vs recasting | Any response signalling the language was not target-like. | One specific type: a correct reformulation that does not break the flow. | A recast is a kind of correction, not an alternative to it. Its weakness is that learners often do not notice it happened. |
| Interlanguage vs L1 interference | The learner’s own rule system, developing on its own path. | The pull of the first language on the second. | Interference is one influence on interlanguage, not a synonym for it. Goed is interlanguage; people is from a Spanish speaker is interference. |
| Affective filter vs motivation | A hypothesised barrier that blocks input from being absorbed. | The drive to engage with learning in the first place. | Low motivation is one of the things Krashen said raises the filter. The filter is the mechanism; motivation is one input to it. |
Data note: distinctions drawn from the sources listed below, compiled 26 August 2026.
Definitional pages earn trust by attribution, so each term below is traced to the work that introduced or established it. Book and journal references are given in full so they can be checked independently rather than taken on ours.
| Term | Source |
|---|---|
| Affective filter | Krashen, S. (1982) Principles and Practice in Second Language Acquisition. Oxford: Pergamon. |
| Interlanguage | Selinker, L. (1972) ‘Interlanguage’, International Review of Applied Linguistics 10(3), pp. 209–231. |
| Scaffolding | Wood, D., Bruner, J. and Ross, G. (1976) ‘The Role of Tutoring in Problem Solving’, Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry 17(2), pp. 89–100; Vygotsky, L. (1978) Mind in Society. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. |
| Total Physical Response | Asher, J. (1969) ‘The Total Physical Response Approach to Second Language Learning’, The Modern Language Journal 53(1), pp. 3–17. |
| The lexical approach | Lewis, M. (1993) The Lexical Approach. Hove: Language Teaching Publications; Nation, I. S. P. (2013) Learning Vocabulary in Another Language, 2nd edn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. |
| Task-based learning | Willis, J. (1996) A Framework for Task-Based Learning. Harlow: Longman; Ellis, R. (2003) Task-based Language Learning and Teaching. Oxford: Oxford University Press. |
| CLT, PPP and method comparison | Richards, J. C. and Rodgers, T. S. (2014) Approaches and Methods in Language Teaching, 3rd edn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. |
| Recasts and corrective feedback | Lyster, R. and Ranta, L. (1997) ‘Corrective Feedback and Learner Uptake’, Studies in Second Language Acquisition 19(1), pp. 37–66. |
| Washback | Alderson, J. C. and Wall, D. (1993) ‘Does Washback Exist?’, Applied Linguistics 14(2), pp. 115–129. |
| Backward design | Wiggins, G. and McTighe, J. (2005) Understanding by Design, 2nd edn. Alexandria, VA: ASCD. |
| Needs analysis | Hutchinson, T. and Waters, A. (1987) English for Specific Purposes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. |
| Reflective practice | Schön, D. (1983) The Reflective Practitioner. New York: Basic Books. |
| Differentiation | Tomlinson, C. A. (2014) The Differentiated Classroom, 2nd edn. Alexandria, VA: ASCD. |
| Level descriptors used throughout | Council of Europe, Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR), including the 2020 Companion Volume. Link checked 26 August 2026. |
| Practitioner articles | British Council, TeachingEnglish, Knowing the subject. Link checked 26 August 2026. |
Data note: reference list compiled and all hyperlinks verified live on 26 August 2026. Print sources are cited in full so they can be checked without a working link.
A glossary is only useful if the terms change what you do on Monday. Three of the free tools on this site map directly onto entries above: the lesson plan generator produces a staged plan you can interrogate for its PPP or task-based shape, the materials adaptor is a differentiation and scaffolded-reading tool in practice, and the CEFR writing grader is formative assessment against Council of Europe descriptors.
For terminology outside pedagogy, such as what TEFL, TESOL, ESOL and CELTA actually stand for and which qualifications employers ask for, the global reference sits with our sister site. The TEFL Institute’s guide to the grammar-translation method covers the one historical method this glossary deliberately leaves to them. If you are teaching or training in Ireland specifically, The TEFL Institute of Ireland holds the Irish course and accreditation procedure, and its lesson-planning walkthrough is a practical companion to the planning entries above.
The methods most used in current TEFL practice are communicative language teaching, task-based learning, the lexical approach, presentation-practice-production and total physical response. Communicative language teaching is the dominant framework; the others are best understood as ways of organising a lesson or a syllabus within it rather than as rivals to it.
An approach is a theory about what language is and how it is learned. A method is a way of teaching built on an approach, with its own syllabus and lesson design. A technique is a single classroom procedure, such as drilling or eliciting. Communicative language teaching is an approach; PPP is a lesson method; a substitution drill is a technique.
There is no single best method, and the search for one is generally treated as settled in the literature. Effective teachers select according to learner level, learning purpose, class size and context. A beginner class learning classroom vocabulary may benefit from total physical response; an exam class needs assessment-aware planning; a business class needs a needs analysis first.
Scaffolding in TEFL is temporary support that lets a learner do something slightly beyond their current ability, and that is deliberately withdrawn as the learner becomes able to manage alone. Sentence starters, models, word banks and partner stages are all scaffolds. The key test is whether the support is being removed over time.
Formative assessment takes place during learning and its purpose is to change the teaching that follows: concept checking, drafts and exit tickets. Summative assessment takes place at the end and its purpose is to report achievement, such as a final exam or a placement test. The distinction is purpose, not format.
Fewer than the list suggests, but the ones you use should be understood properly rather than recognised. Scaffolding, eliciting, formative assessment and the difference between PPP and task-based lessons will cover most observation feedback you receive on an initial certificate course. The remainder become useful as you plan longer courses.
How to cite this definition
tefl.ai (2026) TEFL Teaching Methods & Classroom Techniques: A Teacher’s Glossary. Written by Katie Troy. Published 26 August 2026. Available at: https://tefl.ai/tefl-teaching-methods-glossary/
To cite a single entry, add the term and its anchor, for example https://tefl.ai/tefl-teaching-methods-glossary/#scaffolding. Definitions on this page were last reviewed on 26 August 2026.
Last updated: 16 September 2026 · Written by: Katie Troy, The TEFL Institute Group · Review cycle: definitions are re-checked against their cited sources every six months.
The past simple is the English verb form used for an action or state completed at a finished time in the past. Most verbs form it by adding -ed, while a closed set of common verbs change their form instead. It is the ordinary narrative form of English and the first past form most learners meet.
The present perfect is the English verb form made with have or has plus a past participle, used to link a past action to the present moment. It covers experience up to now, a situation that began in the past and still continues, and a past event whose result matters now. It never takes a finished time reference.
