Teaching English as a Foreign Language, Second Edition

Glossary
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Any utterance can be regarded as an automatic response to a stimulus
which may be verbal, physical, etc.
stress In phonetics, the degree of emphasis or loudness, measurable in
terms of intensity, muscular activity or air-pressure. Word-stress is
concerned with patterns of stressed and unstressed syllables, cf. photo,
photography, photographic; sentence stress is concerned with the
pattern of stresses within the utterances which tend to be placed in the
words carrying the burden of the actual meaning.
stress-timed In English the rhythmic beats occur at fairly regular intervals
of time, making it a stress-timed language. Cf. syllable-timed language,
like French, where each syllable needs to have equal stress.
structure (1) Structure is the way in which parts are formed into a whole. (2)
Conventionally, a structure is a grammatical pattern. Structural linguistics
is concerned with observable formal relationships and tends to discount
subjective and semantic evidence. A structural syllabus or approach takes
linguistic structure as its basis for selection, grading, sequencing and basic
methodology. See also deep structure and surface structure.
study skills Language-related skills which aid study, e.g. use of reference
books, note-taking, skimming, interpretation of data.
style In applied linguistics, the variation of language most often related to
speakers and settings.
stylistics Broadly the linguistic analysis of texts in terms of social function;
more narrowly, the application of linguistic insights and techniques to
literary texts—stylistic analysis.
substitution table A device to demonstrate and practise a number of
structurally related utterances displayed in a table, e.g.:
suggestopedia An approach to learning and teaching developed by
Lozanov in Bulgaria. It emphasises confidence and authority on the
teacher’s part (marked in language teaching by tightly organised
materials and methodology) and relaxed learning (aided by
comfortable seating, background music and role play).
suprasegmental The term for those features of utterances like stress and
intonation which supplement the quality of individual sounds, and
often extend beyond the limits of particular phonemes: length, pitch
and degree of stress. They are also known as prosodic features. Features
of pronunciation are not matters of individual sound segments (q.v.),
but of the whole shape of the whole sound of the sentence or utterance.
E.g. stress, intonation.
surface structure In modern grammar, the linear pattern in which an
utterance appears, as opposed to deep structure (q.v.), which is the
underlying structural representation which determines meaning. The

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Glossary
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ambiguity of the surface structure of ‘Visiting aunts can be boring’ is
accounted for by two possible underlying deep structures: (a) Aunts
pay visits. Aunts can be boring, (b) I visit aunts. My visits can be
boring.
syllable-timed see stress-timed.
syntagmatic Along the horizontal dimension in grammar, as opposed to
the vertical. See paradigm. In the sentences ‘She goes’ and ‘He went’ the
relationships between subject and verb are syntagmatic, and the
relationships between She/he and goes/went are paradigmatic.
syntax see grammar.
synthetic syllabus Wilkins’ term for any syllabus which is the cumulative
teaching of a sequenced inventory of items. E.g. a grammarbased
syllabus.
systemic grammar A model grammatical description concerned with
networks of systems which underlie an utterance; associated with the
work of Halliday.