Articles
Read articles written by expert teachers and English language professionals about a wide range of current English language teaching topics and issues. All of our articles feature ideas and suggestions about how you can develop your teaching and bring new ideas into your English language classroom.
Cline
A cline is a scale of language items that goes from one extreme to another, for example, from positive to negative.
Clipping
Clipping is one of the ways new words are created in English.
Cloze
A cloze is a practice exercise where learners have to replace words missing from a text.
Closed pairs
Working in closed pairs means that the learners are all working in pairs simultaneously and therefore privately.
Cognate
Cognates are words in English and the learner’s language that are similar and have similar meaning.
Cognitive overload
Cognitive overload is a situation where the teacher gives too much information or too many tasks to learners simultaneously, resulting in the learner being unable to process this information.
Cognitive strategies
Cognitive strategies are one type of learning strategy that learners use in order to learn more successfully.
Cognitive style
Cognitive style refers to the way a person thinks and processes information.
Cognitive theory
A cognitive theory of learning sees second language acquisition as a conscious and reasoned thinking process, involving the deliberate use of learning strategies.
Cognitive-code approach
The cognitive-code approach of the 1970s emphasised that language learning involved active mental processes, that it was not just a process of habit formation (the assumption underlying the audiolingual method that came before it).