From Construction Grammar to embodied construction practice
(2022) Construction Grammar across Borders — ISBN: [9789027211484], 119-145, published
Files
2020_FromCxGtoConstPractice_ICCGBrazil.pdf
Open Access - Adobe PDF
- 1.52 MB
Details
- Authors
- 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 CxG model has a number of assets for foreign language teaching (FLT) and learning (FLL). First, 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 is illustrated in the chapter with the inventory of German constructions with the preposition bis (‘up to’, ‘until’). Second, 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 & Ellis 2008; Ellis & Cadierno 2009: 125). But to be proficient in a foreign language also means to use new words in constructions. Learners can be further asked to extend the use of new lexical units as slot-fillers into constructional patterns. 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 chapter makes some suggestions for interactive activities which can foster ‘embodied teaching and learning’.
- Affiliations
Citations
De Knop, S. (2022). From Construction Grammar to embodied construction practice. In Tiago Timponi Torrent, Ely Edison da Silva Matos, Natàlia Sathler Sigiliano (eds.) (ed.), Construction Grammar across Borders (pp. 119-145). John Benjamins Publishing Company. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/237006