Article published In: Review of Cognitive Linguistics
Vol. 18:1 (2020) ► pp.131–161
The embodied teaching of complex verbal constructions with German placement verbs and spatial prepositions
Published online: 17 August 2020
https://doi.org/10.1075/rcl.00054.kno
https://doi.org/10.1075/rcl.00054.kno
Abstract
In recent years, foreign language pedagogy has recognized the need to focus (i) on larger meaningful sequences of words (Nattinger, J. R., & DeCarrico, J. S. (1992). Lexical Phrases and Language Teaching. Oxford: Oxford University Press.; Wray, A. (2002). Formulaic language and the lexicon. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ; Ellis, N. C., & Cadierno, T. (2009). Constructing a second language. Introduction to the special section. Annual Review of Cognitive Linguistics, 71, 11–139. ; González Rey, M. I. (2013). Presentation: Phraseodidactics, an applied field of phraseology. In M. I. González Rey (Ed.), Phraseodidactic studies on German as a foreign language/Phraseodidaktische Studien zu Deutsch als Fremdsprache (pp. 7–10). Hamburg: Dr. Kovac.) and (ii) further on communicative goals (Nunan, D. (1991). Communicative Tasks and the Language Curriculum. Tesol Quarterly, 25(2), 279–295. ; Widdowson, H. G. (1992). ELT and EL Teacher. ELT Journal, 46(4), 333–339. ; Savignon, S. J. (2000). Communicative language teaching. In M. Byram (Ed.), Routledge encyclopedia of language teaching and learning (pp. 125–129). London: Routledge.). Difficulties in the learning process of a foreign language result from the conceptual and constructional differences between expressions in the native and foreign language. Teaching materials often propose a lexical approach with an unstructured set of constructed examples.
With the postulate of meaningful schematic templates, Construction Grammar (CxG) has a number of assets for foreign language teaching (FLT) and learning (FLL), it allows among others to establish a structured inventory of abstract constructions with prototypical exemplars and inheritance links between the constructions’ instantiations. To be proficient in a foreign language also means to use new words in constructions. Learners can be asked to extend the use of new lexical units as slot-fillers into constructional patterns. This is exemplified with the use of German posture and placement verbs in the caused motion construction and the corresponding intransitive locative construction.
But having learned a vast number of constructional templates of a language does not automatically imply that learners can produce L2-constructions and their instantiations in a creative way. Therefore, CxG must be enriched with further insights from Cognitive Linguistics which claims that conceptual categories and their linguistic expressions are the result of embodied processes (Lakoff, G. (1987). Women, fire, and dangerous things. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ). This chapter makes some suggestions for interactive activities which can foster ‘embodied teaching and learning’.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.German constructions with placement verbs
- 2.1Contrastive description of constructions with placement and posture verbs
- 2.2Cognitive linguistic description of the semantic uses of PLVs
- 2.3Constructionist description of the use of PLVs
- 2.4Corpus-linguistic analysis of complex verbal constructions with PLVs
- 3.Learning and teaching issues
- 4.Embodied construction practice
- 4.1Studies on embodied learning
- 4.2Embodied construction practice
- 4.2.1Interactive exercises with bodily engagement
- 4.2.2Metaphorical motivation for causative constructions
- 5.Conclusions and perspectives
- Acknowledgements
- Notes
References
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