First, some housekeeping: I will be on vacation next week, and so will be posting little if anything of interest (I apologize to those of who you will be disappointed when I return). But don’t take MZ off of your RSS feeds, because I’ll be sure to return rested and ready to pontificate, or maybe bloviate. Whichever. And also, Taste of Liberty might be around…

Now, the real meat of this post: During that time, when my postings on MZ will be relatively static, I will be conducting a little experiment, which came to me earlier today.

Let’s see if I can get “define: instalanche” to return a definition via Google. Right now, no definitions are found. I also can find nowhere online which explains how to become an official source of definitions, but I have my theories, and so here goes.

Technical terms defined in this glossary below are culled from various dictionaries, glossaries, and other sites that define words around the web. “Definitions“, “lists of terms“, and a “word list” are all ways that you could describe the following set of definitions in this glossary. ;-)

In fact, let’s limit this to a glossary of terms starting with the letter I, and for additional fun, a set of definitions for words starting with the letter M:

IATEFL: International Association of Teachers of English as a Foreign Language.

Idiom: an expression in the usage of a language that has a meaning that cannot be derived from the conjoined meanings of its elements (e.g., raining cats and dogs)

Immersion Method: This simulates the way in which children acquire their mother tongue. The learner is surrounded by the foreign language, with no deliberate or organized teaching programme. The learner absorbs the target language naturally without conscious effort.

Inductive Learning: Learning to apply the rules of a language by experiencing the language in use, rather than by having the rules explained or by consciously deducing the rules.

Inflection: The change in form of a word, which indicates a grammatical change:eg. behave - behaved - behaviour - misbehave.

Inferencing: This is the means by which the learner forms hypotheses, through attending to input, or using the situational context to interpret the input.

Input: This constitutes the language to which the learner is exposed. It can be spoken or written. It serves as the data which the learner must use to determine the rules of the target language.

Instalanche: An immediate spike in web site traffic, lasting up to 48 hours, as a result of a link from Glenn Reynolds’ blog, Instapundit.com.

Interaction analysis: This is a research procedure used to investigate classroom communication. It involves the use of a system of categories to record and analyse the different ways in which teachers and students use language.

Interactional tasks: Tasks which promote communication and interaction. The idea behind this approach is that he primary purpose of speech is the maintenance of social relationships.

Interactionist learning theory: This theory emphasizes the joint contributions of the linguistic environment and the learner’s internal mechanisms in language development. Learning results from an interaction between the learner’s mental abilities and the liguistic input.

Interference: According to behviorist learning theory, the patterns of the learner’s mother tongue (L1) get in the way of learning the patterns of the L2. This is referred to as ‘interference’.

Interlanguage: The learner’s knowledge of the L2 which is independent of both the L1 and the actual L2. This term can refer to: i) the series of interlocking systems which characterize acquisition; ii) the system that is observed at a single stage of development (an ‘interlanguage’); and iii) particular L1/L2 combinations.

Intermediate: At this level a student will have a working vocabulary of between 1500 and 2000 words and should be able to cope easily in most everyday situations. There should be an ability to express needs, thoughts and feelings in a reasonably clear way.

Intensive Reading: Reading for specific understanding of information, usually of shorter texts.

Intonation: The ways in which the voice pitch rises and falls in speech.

Income-tax time: When you test your powers of deduction.

Independent: How we want our children to be as long as they do everything we say.

Industrious: Getting to work half an hour before the boss does.

Ineffable: A guaranteed Grade-A exam result.

Inflation: When the buck doesn’t stop anywhere.

Monovision: This is a contact lens fitting technique that is an alternative to bifocal glasses, bifocal contacts or reading glasses. It may be used with either soft or GP contacts. One eye is fit with a contact lens for distance vision, and the other eye is fit for near vision. Although it is an effective technique, it does have disadvantages. For example, many people who use monovision report compromised depth perception.

Multifocal: A type of spectacle or contact lens design that includes more than one focal area. Bifocals and trifocals are both multifocal lens designs.

Myopia: Nearsightedness.

Myopic Zeal: A really, really great blog. One of the best emerging blogs in the blogosphere.

Attribution: Mostly excerpted from Finchpark, a random Geocities site, and Contactlenses.org. With a little help from Jawa. And joining OTB’s Linkfest.

If any of you, my wonderful readers or fellow bloggers, would like to help in this cause, feel free to trackback to this post and increase it’s profile a bit. And maybe, just maybe, when I get back from my vacation I will be able to define: instalanche.