sniglet (noun): any word that should be in the dictionary, but isn’t. (Hall, 1983).
I’ve been watching some old sniglet sketches from Not Necessarily the News recently. This one is by far my favourite (sorry for lack of quality):
Call me a bit TEFL-obsessed, but I figured that somebody somewhere must’ve already made a list of TEFL-related sniglets, (tiglets, perhaps?). I’m sure there’s a list out there. I couldn’t find it, although I did stumble across a preview of an article for using sniglets in class…
Anyway, here are a few tiglets I came up with today during a whole morning of tech problems in the staffroom. This is the best use of my planning time this year…
aimbiguous = unclear lesson aims
clinical approach = the tendency to teach all new vocab/grammar using clines, whether appropriate or not. A variant, the inclinical approach, includes lines which steadily move up the board, normally due to poor control of the whiteboard marker
critteria = a bug on an assessment rubric
gistage = an unexpectedly long amount of time for a first listening task
ICQs = lines of teachers waiting outside a conference centre for the doors to open, normally in Siberia/Canada
morment = the sudden realisation during planning/teaching that you haven’t conveyed and checked meaning before highlighting form
PPP = starting a class in the knowledge that you need the toilet
rubricon /ˈru:brɪkɒn/ = assessment criteria for tasks about Italian rivers
rubricon /ru:bˈraɪkɒn/ = an icon in the world of writing assessment criteria
SLAting = criticising certain theorists, e.g. Krashen
subsi-diaries = a daily log book of all a teacher’s sub-aims used during the year
TEFAL = An English for Specific Purposes course for chefs.
Please share a sniglet, sorry, tiglet or two in the comments. If we start now we’ll have a whole Tiglets Annual by Christmas J