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Glossary of Terms

TCNJ – The College of New Jersey

TESOL – Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages

SLA – Second Language Acquisition

ESL/EFL/ELL – English as a Second Language / English as a Foreign Language / English Language Learner

GSL – General Service List; a list, originally written by Michael West in 1953, is comprised of the top 2,000 words every ELL student should learn first in order to understand roughly 90% of general conversation

CA – Conversation Analysis

NL – Native language

TL – Target language

IL – Interlanguage; internalized language system created by the learner with elements from both native language and target language (or from none)

NS – Native speaker

NNS – Nonnative speaker

FT – Foreign talk

LEP – Limited English proficiency

UG – Universal grammar

L1 – Language 1; first language; native language

L2 – Language 2; second language; additional language

BICS – Basic Interpersonal Communication Skills; social language (Cummins 1980)

CALP – Cognitive Academic Language Proficiency; academic language (Cummins 1980)

Silent period – pre-production stage of the second language acquisition process in which the language learner may comprehend the target language, but does not produce speech

Transfer – psychological process in which prior learning is carried over to a new learning situation

Sheltered instruction – approach for teaching content to English learners in strategic ways that make the subject matter concepts comprehensible while promoting the students’ English language development (Echevarría, Vogt, & Short 2004).

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