Embodied construction practice in Foreign Language Teaching
(2018) Linguistics and Language Teaching Day — Location: Université d’Anvers, Research Group Grammar and Pragmatics (28.February.2018)
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De Knop, Sabine 
- Abstract
- In recent years, foreign language pedagogy has recognized the need to focus (i) on larger meaningful sequences of words (Nattinger & DeCarrico 1992; Wray 2002; Ellis & Cadierno 2009; Gonzalez Rey 2013) and (ii) further on communicative goals (Nunan 1991; Widdowson 1992; Savignon 2000). 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. In Goldberg’s (1995 & 2006) Construction Grammar (CxG) larger meaningful sequences are constructions, i.e. entrenched form-meaning mappings resulting from generalization and schematization. The Construction Grammar model has a number of assets for foreign language teaching (FLT) and learning (FLL). 1. With the postulate of meaningful schematic templates, CxG makes it possible to establish a structured inventory of abstract constructions with prototypical exemplars and inheritance links between the constructions’ instantiations. This will be illustrated with the inventory of German constructions with the preposition bis (‘up to’, ‘until’). 2. The L2-templates must then be practiced so that they can become entrenched. CxG focuses on non-compositional sequences of words which are similar to chunks. A methodology based on chunking (Ellis 2009: 147) fosters a “cognitive restructuring in the mind of bilinguals” (Athanasopoulos 2009: 92) or a “rethinking for speaking” (Robinson and Ellis 2008; Ellis and Cadierno 2009: 125). 3. But 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 will be exemplified with the use of German posture and placement verbs in the caused motion and the corresponding intransitive construction (see Ellis and Ferreira 2009). 4. Because CxG offers a more holistic approach, it allows to describe similar constructions in different domains, either literal or phraseological, like for instance with ditransitive phraseologisms (De Knop & Mollica 2016). But having learned a vast number of constructional templates of a language does not automatically imply that the learner can produce L2-constructions and their instantiations in a creative way. Therefore, the CxG model 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 1987). The talk will make some suggestions for interactive activities which can foster ‘embodied teaching and learning’. Literature Athanasopoulos, Panos (2009), Cognitive representation of colour in bilinguals: The case of Greek blues. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition 12: 1, 83-95. De Knop, Sabine & Mollica, Fabio (2016), A construction-based analysis of German ditransitive phraseologisms for language pedagogy. In De Knop, Sabine & Gilquin, Gaëtanelle (eds.), Applied Construction Grammar, 53-88. Berlin: de Gruyter. Ellis, Nick (2009), Optimizing the input: Frequency and sampling in usage-based and form-focused learning. Handbook of Language Teaching 139-158. Ellis, Nick & Cadierno, Teresa (2009), Constructing a Second Language. Introduction to the special section. Annual Review of Cognitive Linguistics 7: 11-139. Ellis, Nick C. & Ferreira-Junior, Fernando (2009), Construction learning as a function of frequency, frequency distribution, and function. The Modern Language Journal 93: 3, 370-385. Goldberg, Adele (1995), Constructions. A Construction Grammar Approach to Argument Structure. University of Chicago Press, Chicago. Goldberg, Adele (2006), Constructions at Work: The Nature of Generalization in Language. Oxford: Oxford University Press. González Rey, Maria Isabel (2013), Presentation: Phraseodidactics, an applied field of Phraseology. In González Rey, Maria Isabel (Ed.), Phraseodidactic Studies on German as a Foreign Language / Phraseodidaktische Studien zu Deutsch als Fremdsprache, 7-10. Hamburg: Dr. Kovac. Lakoff, George (1987), Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Nattinger, James R. & DeCarrico, Jeanette S. (1992), Lexical Phrases and Language Teaching. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Nunan, David (1991), Communicative Tasks and the Language Curriculum. Tesol Quarterly 25: 2, 279–295. Robinson, Peter & Ellis, Nick (2008), Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics and Second Language Acquisition. London: Routledge. Savignon, Sandra J. (2000), Communicative language teaching. In Byram, Michael (Ed.), Routledge Encyclopedia of Language Teaching and Learning, 125–129. London: Routledge. Widdowson, Henry G. (1992), ELT and EL Teacher. ELT Journal 46:4, 333-339. Wray, Alison (2002), Formulaic Language and the Lexicon. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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Citations
De Knop, S. (2018). Embodied construction practice in Foreign Language Teaching. Linguistics and Language Teaching Day, Université d’Anvers, Research Group Grammar and Pragmatics. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/174039