responsible for their own learning, engaged in formulating hypotheses in order to
discover the rules of the target language.Cognitive strategies: learning strategies which involve learners interacting and
manipulating what is to be learned.
Coherence: a property of discourse where sentences are connected in a meaningful
way.
Cohesion: a property of discourse where sentences are connected with explicit
linguistic forms, such as conjunctions.
Communicative approach: an approach to language teaching that makes learning to
communicate central.
Communicative competence: knowing when and how to say what to whom. Being
communicatively competent in the target language means being able to
communicate appropriately with others.
Community of practice: a group of people who share a common interest and/or a
profession. As they share information, they learn from each other (Lave and
Wenger 1991).
Competency-based instruction: adults study certain vital life-coping or survival skills,
such as how to fill out a job application or use the telephone.
Comprehensible input: language that is understood by students. The teacher ensures
that she or he is understood by using pictures, gestures, and occasional words in the
students’ native language.
Comprehension approach: a general approach that includes methods that give
importance to input, especially in the form of listening comprehension.
Computer-assisted language learning (CALL): instruction that uses computer or web-
based technology to teach language.
Concordance: a computer-generated list of words or phrases, used in limited contexts.
Conditioning: associated with behaviorism, conditioning is a process whereby
students learn to respond correctly to stimuli through shaping and reinforcement.
Conscious and subconscious planes: communication takes place on two planes. On
the conscious plane, the learner attends to the language. On the subconscious plane,
the learner receives messages about the ease of the learning process. Learning is
enhanced when there is unity between the conscious and subconscious planes.
Constructivism: students are actively involved in constructing their own knowledge
through experience and problem solving (Dewey 1913).
Control and initiative: a teacher exercises lesser or greater control in the classroom,
which influences how much initiative students are encouraged and able to take
(Stevick 1980).