Eliciting
Eliciting
Eliciting
Often, the teacher provides stimulus using visuals or the board. When
working on the simple present for daily routines, for example, a picture or drawing
of a house and a clock combined with mime can be used to elicit both the names of
household items and common verbs:
The teacher may also model new structures or lexis before it is introduced as
the target language:
Cultural considerations
While eliciting clearly contributes to student involvement, it does not always produce
the desired or expected results. Questions such as ‘Who can tell me something
about....?' may be greeted with stony silence. Students are wrongly labelled as
lacking knowledge or being too shy when there are often cultural reasons for their
reticence.
In cultures where the group is more important than the individual it is unacceptable
to stand out either as a success or as a failure. Even with constant encouragement,
it is difficult to break down entrenched attitudes and beliefs, and certain strategies
may be required:
Nominate students rather than waiting for volunteers. The student is then not
responsible for being made to stand out from the group.
Give learners time to prepare an answer. Spontaneity may be ideal, but
students will be more confident if they are given a moment to think about or even to
write down an answer.
Ensure that there is no right or wrong answer involved. General questions
such as ‘What's your favourite colour?' or ‘What kind of music do you listen to?' are
more likely to produce answers than those requiring specific knowledge.
Encourage rather than correct. When eliciting language, comments such as
‘nearly right' and ‘try again' are more constructive than ‘no, does anyone else know
the right answer?' Try not to correct when learners are volunteering background
information about a topic - confidence-building, not accuracy is important here.
Conclusion
The success of eliciting depends largely on the attitudes of teachers and learners to
their respective roles. Ideally it promotes the notion of an exchange of information,
helps to break down traditional teacher-centredness, and begins to establish a
variety of interaction patterns in the classroom. It is also fundamental to the
inductive approach to teaching language and to learning through tasks and self-
discovery, and a simple and effective way of getting learners to produce language.