Efficacy of Cognitive Instruction in Teaching Deictic Shifts of Motion Verbs in EFL Classrooms

Ying-hsueh Hu

Abstract


This study investigated an alternative pedagogy to teaching motion deixis, in particular, two English deictic verbs bring and take to EFL learners. Sixty-five first year students from a university in Northern Taiwan participated in a comparative experiment. They were divided into 1) a control group (CT), receiving implicit treatment with no particular rules explained, apart from Chinese translation, and 2) an experimental group, receiving explicit Cognitive Instruction (CI). Each group was treated with four sessions (30 minutes/session) of respective instruction, and a pre-test prior to and two post tests (one post-test and one delayed post-test) after the treatment were administered to gauge participants’ performance. Results indicate that the CI group made significant improvements in both short-term and long-term recall, while the CT in short-term recall only. The findings support that CI instruction of vocabulary and grammar is beneficial, and even necessary, to some aspects of EFL learning, particularly those concerned with learning deixis concepts.


Keywords


Motion Deictic Verbs; EFL Pedagog; Cognitive Linguistics; Language Motivation

Full Text:

PDF

References


Blakemore, D. (1996). Understanding Utterances. Oxford, United Kingdom: Blackwell Publishers Ltd.

Boers, F. (2004). Cognitive Linguistics, Second Language Acquisition, and Foreign Language Teaching. In M. Achard & S. Niemeier (Eds.), Expanding Learners’ Vocabulary Through Metaphor Awareness: What Expansion, What Learners, What Vocabulary? Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

Boers. F. (2000). Metaphor awareness and vocabulary retention. Applied Linguistics, 21(4), 553-571.

Boers, F. (2013). Cognitive Linguistic approaches to second language vocabulary: Assessment and integration. Language Teaching: Surveys and Studies, 46(2): 208-224.

Boers, F. & Lindstromberg, S. (2008a). Cognitive Linguistic Approaches to Teaching

Vocabulary and Phraseology. In F. Boers & S. Lindstromberg (Eds.), From empirical findings to pedagogical practice. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

Boers, F. & Lindstromberg, S. (2008b). Formulaic sequences and L2 oral proficiency: Does the type of target language influence the association? International Review of Applied Linguistics, 49(4), 321-343.

Boers, F. & Lindstromberg, S. (2008c). Structural elaboration by the sound (and feel) of it. In Cognitive Linguistic Approaches to Teaching Vocabulary and Phraseology, Frank B. & Lindstromberg S. (Eds.), 330-353. (ACL 6). Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter.

Brugman, C. (1988). The Story of Over: Polysemy, Semantics, and the Structure of the Lexicon. New York: Garland.

Brugman, C. & Lakoff, G. (1988). Cognitive topology and lexical networks. In S. Small, G. Cottrell & M. Tannenhaus (Eds.), Lexical Ambiguity Resolution

(pp.477-507). San Mateo, CA: Morgan Kaufman.

Csábi, S. (2004). Cognitive Linguistics, Second Language Acquisition, and Foreign

Language Teaching. In M. Achard & S. Niemeier (Eds.), A cognitive Linguistic View of pilysemy in English and its Implications for Teaching. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

Coe, N. (1973). ‘Come’, ‘Go’, ‘Bring’ and ‘Take’. English Language Teaching, 27(2), 137-142.

Condon, N. (2008). How cognitive linguistic motivations influence the learning of phrasal verbs. In F. Boers & S. Lindstromberg (Eds.), Cognitive Linguistic Approaches to Teaching Vocabulary and Phraseology (pp.133-158). Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter.

Cook, G. (2010). Translation in Language Teaching. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Croft, W. & Cruse, D. A. (2004). Cognitive Linguistics. Cambridge, United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press.

Evans, V. (2004). The Structure of Time: Language, Meaning and Temporal Cognition. Amsterdam, Netherlands: John Benjamins Publishing.

Evans, V. (2010). A lexical concepts and cognitive models approach to spatial semantics: the “state†sense of English prepositions. In V. Evans & P. Chilton (Eds.), Language, Cognition and Space (pp.215-248). London: Equinox Publishing.

Evans. V. (2014). Language myth: Why language is not an instinct. Cambridge: CUP.

Fillmore, C. J. (1966). Deictic categories in semantics of ‘come’. Foundations of Language, 2(3), 219-227.

Fillmore, C. J. (1976). Frame semantics and the nature of language. Annual of the New York Academy of Science: Conference on the Origin and Development of Language and Speech, 280, 20-32.

Fordyce, K. (2014). The differential effects of explicit and implicit instruction on EFL learners use of epistemic stance. Applied Linguistics, 35(1), 6-28.

Grundy, P. (2000). Doing Pragmatics, 2nd ed. London: Arnold, Hodder Headline Group.

Hu, Y. H., & Ho, Y. C. (2009). Prepositions we live by: Implications of the polysemy network in teaching English prepositions in and on. In B. Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk & K. Dziwirek (Eds.), Studies in Cognitive Corpus Linguistics (pp. 335-370). New York; Frankfurt: Peter Lang Verlag.

Hu, Y. & Kang, Y. C. (2008, October). Bring and take—that’s the question in teaching deictic shift in FL classrooms. Paper presented at 2008 Second Language Forum, University of Hawaii at Manoa, USA.

Johnson, M. (1987). The Body in the Mind. The Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imagination, and Reason. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Kusuyama, Y. (2005). The acquisition of deictic verbs by Japanese ESL Learners. NUCB JLCC, 7(2), 31-43.

Lakoff, G. (1987). Women, Fire and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal about the Mind. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Lam, Y. Y. (2003). Challenging Prepositions: The Effectiveness of Interrelating Rules for Teaching POR and PARA in Spanish as a Second Language (Doctoral Dissertation). University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada.

Langacker, R. W. (1987). Foundation of Cognitive Grammar. Vol. 1: Theoretical Prerequisites. CA: Stanford University Press.

Langacker, Ronald W. (2002). Concept, Image, and Symbol: The Cognitive Basis of Grammar, 2nd ed. New York, Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

Lee, David (2002). Cognitive Linguistics – An Introduction. UK: Oxford University Press.

Luo, P. W. (2013). Implication of the Polysemous Network in Teaching Phrasal Verbs with Spatial Particles: Out, Up and Off (Master’s thesis). Tamkang University, New Taipei City, Taiwan.

O’grady, W., Dobrovolsky, M., & Francis, K. (1997). Contemporary Linguistics – An Introduction. London: Pearson Education Limited.

Slobin, D. I. (2004). The many ways to search for a frog: Linguistic typology and the expression of motion events. In S. Strömqvist & L.Verhoeven (Eds.), Relating Events in Narrative: Typological and Contextual Perspectives (pp. 219-257). London: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Sweetser, E. E. (1986), Polysemy vs. abstraction: Mutually exclusive or complementary? In K. Nikikoridou, M. Varclay, M. Niepokuk & D. Feder (Eds.), Proceedings of the 12th Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistic Society (pp. 528-538). Berkeley: Berkeley Linguistic Society.

Sweetser, E. E. (1990), From Etymology to Pragmatics: Metaphorical and Cultural Aspects of Semantics Structure. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Talmy, L. (1985). Lexicalization patterns. Semantic structure in lexical form. In T. Shopen (Ed.), Language Typology and Syntactic Description, Vol. 3 (pp. 36-149). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,

Talmy, Leonard. (2000). Toward a Cognitive Semantics, Vol. 2, Typology and Process in Concept Structuring. Cambridge, London: MIT Press.

Thorndike, E.L. (1920). A constant error in psychological ratings. Journal of Applied Psychology, 4(1), 25-29. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/h0071663

Tyler, A. & Evans, V. (2003). The Semantics of English Prepositions: Spatial Senses, Embodied Meaning and Cognition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Tyler, A. & Evans,V. (2004). Spatial experience, lexical structure and motivation: the case of in. In G. Rudden & K. Panther (Eds.), Studies in Linguistic Motivation (pp. 157-192). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

Ungerer, F. & Schmid, H.-J. (2006). An Introduction to Cognitive Linguistics, 2nd ed., UK: Pearson.

Winke, P. & Kim, Y. (2002, October). It's not over with over: Cognitive approaches to teaching prepositions. Poster session presented at Second Language Research Forum. Toronto, Canada.

Yang, Y. Y. & Hsieh, C. Y. (2010). Conceptual metaphor awareness on English phrasal verbs teaching and learning for adolescents in Taiwan. Retrieved October 20, 2014 from ir.lib.ncku.edu.tw/handle/987654321/108255.

Yasuda, S. (2010). Learning phrasal verbs through conceptual metaphors: A case of Japanese EFL learners. TESOL Quarterly, 44(2), 250-273.


Refbacks

  • There are currently no refbacks.


e-ISSN: 1694-2116

p-ISSN: 1694-2493