Editing Openai/68dbfe17-7fb4-800b-a4e8-28b4e7e38928 (section)

===== Broadening the definition =====

Emergent language is often defined by what teachers notice and work with during a lesson. It’s usually tied to how a teacher reacts to something a student says in real time — for example, picking up on a phrase, drawing attention to it, and building an activity around it.

But in practice, emergent language isn’t owned by the teacher. It’s any spontaneous communicative language that learners produce, whether or not it’s noticed, corrected, or exploited. And that broader view is more useful now than ever, because learners have tools at their disposal that can help them exploit emergent language for themselves.