It is hard to talk about words that are not there. For this reason, ellipsis has been given little attention in grammar texts, let alone addressed as a skill required for competent listening and reading
comprehension. I call the wide variety of omitted words tacits, since native speakers tacitly understand what is missing and non-native speakers generally do not. Missing words often lead learners into linguistic wrong-turns and dead-ends, which can lead to comprehension confusion, when nouns follow nouns, auxiliaries and modals are dropped, verbs are omitted, conjunctions removed and interjections expanded into incomplete phrases. In most cases, the words unspoken have an antecedent
referent, which causes problems for beginner listeners and word-encoding readers. The first part of this paper is a discussion of the variety of different grammatical and linguistic structures in which words are deleted, substituted and omitted —totally almost 50 different forms in all. The second part discusses a questionnaire administered to first year freshman English majors at a Japanese university. The third part of the paper is a discussion of how ESL teachers can teach
tacits.