Eliciting is the technique of drawing language, ideas, or knowledge from learners rather than simply telling them. Instead of saying "The past tense of 'go' is 'went'," the teacher creates a context and prompts students to produce the form themselves. It's a cornerstone of learner-centred teaching: the assumption is that students know more than they think, and the teacher's job is to activate that knowledge before supplying what's missing.
Eliciting serves multiple purposes simultaneously:
| Technique | Example |
|---|---|
| Context + question | Show a picture of someone running for a bus: "What's happening? What verb do we use?" |
| Gap-fill oral | "Yesterday I ______ to the shops" (gesture for past) |
| Visual prompts | Timelines, pictures, realia, gestures |
| Concept questions | "Is it finished? Did it happen in the past?"; close to Concept Checking Questions territory |
| Definitions | "What do we call the person who flies a plane?" |
| Sentence completion | Write a gapped sentence on the board; students complete it |
| Translation | At lower levels, ask for L1 equivalent, then work toward L2 |
The debate isn't binary. Effective teachers elicit when students are likely to know something and tell when they're not. A useful heuristic: elicit to review, tell to introduce, then elicit again to check. Guided Discovery takes this further by structuring an entire sequence so learners work out rules from examples, with eliciting at each step.
Eliciting is philosophically linked to Learner-centredness because it positions students as active contributors rather than passive receivers. It overlaps with Concept Checking Questions, which are a specific form of elicitation targeting meaning comprehension. In a Guided Discovery lesson, eliciting is the engine that drives learners toward noticing patterns and forming rules.