Classroom management

~ is the teacher’s organisation of a group of learners to establish appropriate modes of conduct, grouping arrangements, and strategies for effective learning in the classroom. It implies the different strategies teachers use to gain and retain a class’s attention, keep order, and allow learner contributions in an orderly way. It includes planning and managing class activities and the transitions between them, beginnings and endings of lessons as well as organising solo, pair, group and whole class work. Successful classroom management involves the efficient use of materials, resources (hardware and software etc) and the effective

use of classroom space. In short, ~ means the strategies used by a teacher to organise the classroom, the learning and the learners, such as seating arrangements, different types of activities, teacher roles and interaction patterns.

Closed question

A question which leads to a yes/no answer or another very short response, e.g. Did you come to school by bus? Yes. What did you have for breakfast? Toast. See open question.

Cloze procedure

An exercise where every fifth word (or sixth or seventh, etc.) is deleted from a text. The interval between the deleted words should remain the same throughout the text. The student then supplies the missing words, often relying on contextualization for help.

Cloze test

A task-type in which learners read a text with missing words and try to work out what the missing words are. The missing words are removed regularly from the text, e.g. every seventh word. A cloze test is used for testing reading ability or general language use. It is different from a gap-fill activity, which can focus on practising or testing a specific language point. See gap-fill.

Clue

A piece of information that helps someone to find the answer to a problem, e.g. a teacher could give the first letter of a word she is trying to elicit as a clue to learners to help them find the word.

Code-switching

~ is one kind of intra-speaker variation. It occurs when a speaker changes from one variety or language to another variety or language in accordance with situational or purely personal factors.

Cognitive strategies

O’Malley and Chamot define ~ as learning strategies that ‘operate directly on incoming information, manipulating it in ways that enhance learning’ (1990: 44). They involve such operations as rehearsal, organising information, and inferencing.