expressivist approach n
in the teaching of writing, the belief that the free expression of ideas leads
to self-discovery and that teachers should help students develop their own
ideas, voice, and stance in order to produce fresh and spontaneous prose.
extension task n
in language teaching, an activity that gives learners further and sometimes
more demanding practice of a new teaching item.
extensive reading n
in language teaching, reading activities are sometimes classified as extensive
and intensive.
Extensive reading means reading in quantity and in order to gain a general
understanding of what is read. It is intended to develop good reading
habits, to build up knowledge of vocabulary and structure, and to encourage
a liking for reading.
Intensive readingis generally at a slower speed, and requires a higher degree
of understanding than extensive reading.
external speech n
see inner speech
external validity n
(in research design) the extent to which the results of an experimental study
can be generalized to the larger population from which participants were
drawn. Examples of threats to external validity include selection biaswhere
a group of participants in the study is sampled with biasor pre-test sensitiza-
tionwhere how participants respond to the treatmentmay be affected by
the pre-test they took.
see also internal validity, generalizability
extinction n
see stimulus-response theory
extinct languagen
another term for dead language
extraction n
a grammatical operation by which one constituentis moved out of another.
For example, in the sentence Who did you say that you saw?, the pronoun
whohas been extracted from an embedded clause (you saw __) and moved
to the front of the sentence.
expressivist approach