When elicitation goes wrong

Don’t know if it’s midnight feeds, old age or early onset Alzheimer’s, but I seem to be pausing for thought a lot more than usual in class recently. Unfortunately, I’ve got my students so well trained to be elicited from that they’ve been completing my sentences for me even when that wasn’t the intention!

I had been reacting against elicitation as sometimes patronising and often automatically used for no real purpose, but doing a classroom language course for teachers where I took it on myself to be a model of the kinds of classroom questions that I was talking about seems to have put me back at post-CELTA level. Better than monologues and/ or student silence but can be, and is probably being, overdone.

Was more amused than troubled by this development, but for a more serious look at elicitation you could look at Advantages and disadvantages of eliciting in the EFL classroom. Alternatively, you could see this as a continuation of my Most Overrated Things in TEFL series.