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).