In English language teaching, eliciting is a favourable technique which facilitates students to become more active participants in language learning.

1.What is Eliciting

Eliciting means getting information from people as opposed to giving it to them. It helps the teacher encourage students to produce the target language rather than supplying it to them.

For example, if you were aiming to teach the word “photo”, you could show a photo to the class. You may find that one or two students have already known the word or have a rough idea. Approaching the new language is like this, rather than immediately telling students, focuses their attention on the target language. If no students know the word, you can supply it and students will be ready and motivated to learn it. If the teacher doesn’t elicit, he would be at the risk of telling the students everything and ending up with spoon-feeding them.

2.Eliciting is Useful in Teaching

In traditional teaching, English knowledge is just poured from one receptacle into an empty one. The teacher always has a lot to explain to the students while the students always feel passive in class and wait to be told everything. However, teaching does not equal to learning. Learning demands energy and attention from the learner. Students need something else beyond simply listening to the explanations from their teacher. So eliciting comes out as a useful technique.

By eliciting, the teacher can bring relevant information to the front of students’mind and draw out information, language, ideas from the students. Therefore, it is possible for the teacher to know clearly what the students have already known and what they still need to work on.

Eliciting constantly provides the teacher an idea of the students’previous knowledge and understanding, and exposes misunderstandings which may need to be cleared up before new knowledge is introduced. This also helps the teacher to save time.

With eliciting, the teacher can increase students’ talking time. Eliciting provides students with more opportunities to say something. With eliciting, the teacher will find it easier to get students involved and interested. With eliciting, language is learned through a process of “guided discovery”. If students are given a problem to solve or a task to complete, they will learn far more by experimenting, practising and taking risks. They will not have to wait for the teacher’s “fish”. With eliciting, the teacher can help students to develop their learning strategies. Students learn by trying to do things themselves and gradually finding out an effective and practical way of their own learning. They are able to work with less fear of taking risks or facing challenges. Their self-esteem and self-understanding are increased, which gradually helps them take more responsibility for their own learning. They will feel that they are able to do it and therefore they are more ready to be involved in class.

3.What Can be Elicited in Teaching

The teacher can elicit the target language, some model sentences. Students’interests, opinions and personal information are also something that should not be neglected in eliciting because those elements are relevant to the eliciting.

As Edge points out: Into class, they bring with their names, their knowledge, experience, intelligence, skills, emotions, imagination, awareness, creativity, sense of humour, problems, purposes, dreams, hopes, aspirations, fear, memories, interests, blind spots, prejudices, habits, expectations, likes, dislikes, preferences, and everything else that goes with being a human being, including the ability to speak at least one language. So even more things can be elicited from students to promote their learning.

4.How to Elicit

Eliciting is not simply telling students to say something. Usually eliciting consists of giving clues and prompts in order to get the students to make an appropriate feedback. Eliciting can be done through a variety of techniques depending on the type of language the teacher is teaching.

(1) Asking questions ( definition questions, comprehension questions or conversational questions) is a typical and important way of eliciting. Many teachers also find it fairly useful to elicit by using visuals.

(2) You can draw pictures on the board or use pictures to elicit names of rooms, methods of transport, etc.

(3) Miming and body language are particularly helpful when eliciting some vocabulary.

(4) You can work backwards from answers to elicit question forms.

(5) Asking for synonyms, antonyms and homophones can be another effective way to help students to know the exact words. For example, “what’s the synonym for‘tedious’?” When eliciting the word ‘boring’, it deepens the students’recognition of the word ‘tedious’.

(6) If it is not easy to find out the meaning of some words or the background knowledge of a certain topic, the teacher can try to put it in a context to make it more understandable.

(7) If necessary, examples can be very practical. For example: How do you go to school?

Based on many excellent lessons I have watched, I found it useful to elicit by asking questions. After studying a text, instead of explaining words, I always ask definition questions to teach some words.

Eliciting can be used throughout a lesson. It can be used as a presentation, revision, concept checking, and a consolidation.

5.Some Principles

(1) Plan specific questions to elicit.

(2) It is important to complete the elicitation. First the teacher conveys an idea to the students. Then the students supply information to the teacher. The teacher should always remember to give feedback to the students.

(3) The teacher can’t elicit things that the students don’t know in the first place.

(4) Respond positively to every effort from the students at using English.

(5) Don’t wait too long for an answer. Students’ failing to provide an answer indicates that they need the teacher’s input.

When eliciting, there is not any routine for the teacher to elicit, but what’s important is that the teacher should always be flexible and sensitive in his elicitation.

In conclusion, eliciting can be used as a basic technique in most lessons for keeping the class actively involved and improving teaching qualities. When teachers in China are struggling to find better ways to motivate their students, develop the students learning strategies, why not try to use the technique of eliciting.