Why Eliciting Matters More Than You Think in the ESL Classroom

Alan David Pritchard
2 days ago
5 min read

ESL-Wise: Blog 7

Why Eliciting Matters More Than You Think in the ESL Classroom

By Alan David Pritchard

A female ESL teacher engages students in a classroom discussion, eliciting a raised-hand response from a teenage learner during a language lesson.

There’s a moment in every ESL lesson — sometimes subtle, sometimes obvious — when we face a choice.

We can tell students the answer.Or we can guide them toward it.

Telling is faster. It’s tidy. It gives us that dopamine hit of having “covered” the material. But over time, you come to realise: the more we tell, the less they remember.

That’s where eliciting comes in — not as a warm-up gimmick or “activating prior knowledge” checkbox, but as a deeply intentional mindset.

Eliciting, when done well, changes the energy of the room. It moves students from receivers to contributors. It makes the lesson about them — what they know, what they half-know, and what they’re about to discover.

And in the ESL classroom, that shift might be more important than anything else we do.

What Is Eliciting, Really?

Let’s be clear: eliciting isn’t about tossing out vague prompts and hoping for lucky guesses. It’s not “Anyone know what this means?” thrown into the void.

It’s a structured technique — one that:

Activates learners’ existing knowledge
Builds confidence through accessible entry points
Encourages language output from the start
Surfaces misunderstandings before they fossilise
Opens up thinking, rather than narrowing it.

At its best, eliciting builds a bridge between what students already know and what they’re about to learn. Not a gap — a bridge.

It slows us down, yes. But in all the right ways. It invites students to think aloud, take ownership, and co-construct meaning. That’s where retention begins.

What Does Eliciting Look Like?

Let’s move from theory to classroom reality. Consider these shifts:

Instead of: “Generous means giving.”
Try: “Can you think of someone who gives a lot, even when they don’t have to? What would you call them?”
Instead of: “The third conditional is used for unreal past situations.”
Try: “What do we say when we want to imagine something different that could have happened — but didn’t?”
Instead of: “Let me read this text to you.”
Try: “What do you already know about volcanoes? Let’s build a word bank together before we read.”

The change isn’t huge — but the impact is. Because now the students are invested before the teaching begins.

I have found that, when teaching tenses, it is better to show students two similar tenses, and ask them to discern the difference between them. Here is an example, with the questions to elicit desired responses.

A timeline image showing the difference between past continuous and past perfect, used to illustrate how eliciting helps students notice grammar structure. — Here, I show students two sentences and, using eliciting questions, guide them to deduce the rules.

Why Eliciting Matters (Far More Than You Think)

Let’s look at the real benefits, backed by cognitive science and classroom experience:

1. Eliciting activates memory.

Students are far more likely to remember a word or structure they’ve retrieved, even partially, than one they’ve simply been told.

This is known as the testing effect — the act of recall strengthens the memory trace. Eliciting, then, isn’t a fluffy prelude to teaching. It’s the start of learning.

2. It encourages participation — especially from hesitant learners.

When done well, eliciting lowers the stakes. It invites exploration rather than demands perfection. It says: Let’s build this together.

For multilingual learners who spend much of their school day feeling a step behind, this is powerful. It creates space for partial knowledge. It rewards effort. It levels the playing field.

3. It reveals what’s missing.

One of the most useful by-products of eliciting is diagnostic insight.

“What do we know about this word?”“When have you seen this structure before?”“What might happen next in this sentence?”

These aren’t rhetorical. They’re windows into learner understanding. What students don’t say can be just as informative as what they do.

4. It models a learning stance.

When we elicit, we demonstrate how to approach unfamiliar language: With curiosity. With inference. With connection-making.

This is the kind of learner behaviour we want to develop — and eliciting puts it front and centre. Over time, students start asking these questions themselves.

Inference sentence frames are, in a sense, eliciting in disguise.

They don’t just give students a way to speak or write — they give them a way in. A well-phrased frame like “Because I can see ___ and ___, I think that ___” draws language out of students who might not yet have the confidence to build full analytical responses on their own.

You're still prompting them to think, to connect, to justify — but with just enough scaffolding to help them get there.

The structure does the heavy lifting, but the thinking is still theirs.

Inference sentence frames for ESL learners – speaking and writing scaffolds that support eliciting responses, developing analytical thinking, and guiding structured language output in the classroom. — Here is an example of speaking and writing frames to elicit inference thinking skills for images and text. I created levels so students could choose a level that suited them best in terms of their abilities - but encouraged them to try harder levels as the term progressed.

But Let’s Be Honest: Eliciting Can Go Wrong

I’ve seen it. I’ve done it.

You ask a question, wait… and get blank stares. You rephrase, gesture wildly, throw in clues… still nothing. Suddenly you’re playing 20 Questions while students retreat into silence.

That’s not eliciting. That’s floundering.

Good eliciting is precise. Supported. Purposeful. It’s not guesswork. And it’s never about putting students on the spot just to fill airtime.

Here’s what helps:

Ask focused questions that build toward the target.
Accept multiple routes to meaning — don’t fixate on one “correct” word.
Validate partial answers, then build on them.
Know when to step in and model — the bridge needs both ends anchored.

Here, sometimes, when my questions are met with silence, I will layer visual clues to encourage the response I am looking for.

And above all, know your learners. Tailor your questions to what they can realistically reach. That’s where the magic happens.

In the End, Eliciting Is About Trust

Trust that your students are thinking, even if they’re quiet. Trust that partial understanding can grow.

Trust that, with time, your classroom becomes a place where learners expect to be asked what they know — and feel safe answering.

Because when we elicit, we’re saying something more than “What’s the answer?”

We’re saying:

I think you can get there.I believe what you know is worth surfacing. You’re not just here to absorb — you’re here to contribute.

And for an ESL learner, that message might be the most empowering one of all.

Final Thought: Start with What They Know

If you take nothing else from this article, take this:

Start from what they know.

Then build. Ask. Nudge. Reframe. Elicit.

Because when students feel their knowledge has value — even if it’s incomplete — they show up differently. They lean in. They try. And the classroom becomes not just a place of input, but of emergence.

You’re not just teaching English. You’re drawing language out of them — word by word, voice by voice.

That begins with a question.

Why Eliciting Matters More Than You Think in the ESL Classroom

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