1+Language+Terms


 * Here are some important terms when it comes to working ESL students.**

**BICS:** Basic Interpersonal Communication Skills: Language needed in social situations. []

**Borrowing** : The incorporating of a loan word from one language into another. Ex: English borrowed buoy from dutch.

**CALP** :refers to formal academic learning: this includes listening, speaking, reading, and writing about subject area content material. []

**Codeswitching** : the movement back and forth between two languages of dailects within the same sentence or discourse. []

**Cognates**: Words in related languages that developed from the same ancestral root. Ex. English man and German mann. []

**Dialect**: A variety of a language whose grammer differs in systematic ways from other varieties. Differences may be lexical, phonological, syntactic, and semantic. []

**Fossilizaion**: A characteristic of second-language learning in which the learners reaches a plateau and seems unable to acquire some property of the L2 grammer. []

**Grammer Translation**: A method of second-language learning in which the student memorizes words and syntactic rules and translates them between the native language and target language. []

**Idiolect**: An individual's way of speaking, reflecting the person's grammer. []

**Language Isolate**: A natural language with no demonstrable genealogical relationship with other living languages. []

**Linguistic Competence**: The knowledge of a language represented by the mental grammer that accounts for speakers' linguistic ability and creativity. (mostly this in unconcious knowledge) []

**Loan Word**: Word in one language whose origins are in another language. Ex: in Japanese, besiboru, "baseball," is a loan word from English.

**Linguistic Performance**: The use of linguistic competence in the production and comprehension of language. Ex: Linguistic competence permits one-million-word sentences, but linguistic performance prevents this from happening.

**Polyglots**: A person who speaks several languages. []

**Simultaneous bilingualism:** Refers to the simultaneous acquisition of two languages beginning in infancy (of before the age of three years). []

**Slang**: Words and phrases used in casual speech, often invented and spread by close-knit social or age groups, and fast-changing. [] offers examples from a to z.