ENG514 Important Terms

ENG514

• Meaning-focused Input: Activities that involve listening or reading where learners focus on understanding messages, not language forms, e.g., listening to stories or watching videos.
• Meaning-focused Output: Tasks requiring speaking or writing where learners concentrate on conveying ideas, e.g., giving presentations or writing essays.
• Language-focused Learning: Explicit teaching or learning of language features, such as vocabulary, grammar, and pronunciation, using deliberate practice like drills or exercises.
• Fluency Development: Improving ease and speed of language use across skills (listening, speaking, reading, writing), often through repetitive, familiar activities.
• Comprehensible Input: Language input that learners can understand, often slightly above their current proficiency level, facilitated through visuals or simplified language.
• Negotiated Syllabus: A course plan developed collaboratively by teachers and learners, tailored to learners' needs and goals.
• Syntactic Knowledge: Understanding grammar and sentence structure, essential for comprehending complex texts or spoken language.
• Discourse Knowledge: Awareness of how language is used in different contexts, such as storytelling or academic lectures, to structure messages coherently.
• Pragmatic Knowledge: Knowing how language is used in social contexts, including speaker intentions and implied meanings.
• Metacognition: Awareness and regulation of one’s learning processes, such as planning, monitoring, and evaluating comprehension and performance.
• Interactive Listening: Listening that involves real-time interaction, like in conversations, requiring active engagement and responses.
• One-way Listening: Listening where there’s no immediate interaction, e.g., listening to lectures or radio broadcasts.
• Two-way Listening: Engaging in dialogue or conversations where both parties actively participate in the exchange of ideas.
• Top-down Processing: Using background knowledge, context, and expectations to understand a message, predicting content before fully processing details.
• Bottom-up Processing: Decoding the details of language, like sounds, words, and grammar, to understand the message.
• Listening Grids: Structured tools used in listening exercises where learners fill in information based on what they hear, improving focused comprehension.
• Semantic Processing: The cognitive process of understanding meaning, involving connections between new information and existing knowledge.
• Schema Activation: Using prior knowledge and experiences to make sense of new information, crucial for comprehension.
• Comprehension Structures: Mental frameworks or maps created by listeners to organize and integrate information from texts or speech.
• Intonation Units: Segments of speech marked by pitch and stress patterns, aiding listeners in identifying key ideas or transitions in spoken language.
• Phonological Phrase: A chunk of speech that forms a cohesive unit in pronunciation and meaning, often a sentence or clause.
• Phonotactic Knowledge: Understanding allowable sound combinations in a language, aiding in recognizing spoken words.
• Allophonic Variations: Slight pronunciation changes of sounds depending on context, such as "gonna" instead of "going to."
• Cluster Reduction: Simplification of consonant clusters in speech, e.g., "friend" pronounced as "frien'."
• Syntactic Parsing: Analyzing sentence structure in real time during listening to assign roles (subject, object) to words for comprehension.
• Ellipsis Calculation: Inferring omitted parts of sentences, such as pronouns or verbs, based on context, e.g., “She can do it better than I [can].”
• Propositional Models: Mental representations of ideas conveyed in a text or speech, helping in understanding relationships between concepts.
• Formulaic Language: Pre-learned phrases and expressions, like idioms or greetings, used to facilitate fluency and communication.
• Kinesic Signals: Non-verbal cues from body movements, such as gestures and facial expressions, aiding in interpreting spoken messages.
• Baton Signals: Rhythmic gestures, like hand movements, used to emphasize or punctuate spoken language.
• Directional Gaze: Eye movements that guide listeners’ attention to visual references or indicate focus during communication.
• Guide Signals: Movements or gestures that enhance comprehension, like pointing to an object while describing it.
• Inferencing: Drawing logical conclusions from incomplete information, essential for understanding implied meanings.
• Parsimony Principle: Using the simplest explanation or schema necessary for understanding a message, avoiding overcomplication.
• Prototype Theory: The idea that understanding relies on matching new information with typical examples stored in memory.
• McGurk Effect: A cognitive phenomenon where conflicting auditory and visual speech inputs lead to misinterpretation, showing the interplay of senses in listening.
• Articulatory Causes: The physical movements of speech organs (tongue, lips) that produce specific sounds, important for accurate pronunciation.
• Psychoacoustic Effects: How listeners perceive sound qualities like pitch or timbre, influencing speech recognition.
• Recognition of Words: The process of identifying spoken words through phonological, contextual, and syntactic cues.
• Linguistic Commitment: The specialization of brain areas for processing specific language features, developed over time with use.
• Automaticity in Processing: The ability to quickly and efficiently process language features without conscious effort.
• Cognitive Commitment: Engaging mental focus on a task or topic, aiding deeper understanding and retention.
• Neural Transmission: The brain’s processing of auditory signals into comprehensible speech through neural networks.