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Date: April 22, 2021
Date: April 22, 2021
Time: 16:30h
BIO
Ana Mª Piquer-Píriz is a lecturer at the Faculty of Education (University of Extremadura, Spain) where she teaches undergraduate courses to teacher trainees and postgraduate courses in the MA programme ‘Master on Bilingual Education at Primary and Secondary Levels’. Her research interests concern EFL learning and teaching, L2 vocabulary acquisition, figurative language, and Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL). Her work has appeared in journals such as System, Language, Culture and Curriculum, Language Teaching Research, Review of Cognitive Linguistics, Metaphor and the Social World or VIAL and she has also published three co-edited volumes (Metaphor in Use: Context, culture, and communication, with Fiona MacArthur, José Luis Oncins and Manuel Sánchez; and Applying Cognitive Linguistics: Figurative language in use, constructions and typology and Metaphor in Foreign Language Instruction, both co-edited with Rafael Alejo) as well as several book chapters with John Benjamins and Mouton de Gruyter. She is currently involved in a regionally-funded and two EU-funded projects on CLIL: INCOLLAB (‘Interdisciplinary Learning and Teaching: Collaborative Approaches’, Project No. 2019-1-CZ01-KA203-061163, https://incollabeu.wixsite.com/project ); CLIL4YEC (‘CLIL for Young European Citizens’, Project No. 2019-1-IT02-KA201-063222, https://clil4yec.eu/ ), and, ICLUEx (‘Developing virtual collaborative learning environments for content and language integrated learning (CLIL) in Higher Education adapted to the University of Extremadura’ -“Diseño de entornos virtuales de aprendizaje colaborativo para la enseñanza integrada de contenidos y lenguas extranjeras (AICLE) en la Educación Superior adaptados a la Universidad de Extremadura” (IB18055), https://l2earnuex.wixsite.com/icluex . She also took part in the nationally-funded research project EuroCoAT (‘Metaphor use in one-to-one academic consultations in English: Implications for Spanish student mobility in Europe’, Project No. FFI2011-22809, http://www.eurocoat.es/) and is now involved in METCLIL (‘La metáfora en el lenguaje académico oral: La producción metafórica en los seminarios de los programas AICLE en la Educación Superior’, Project No. FFI2017-86320-R)
Cognitive Linguistics and its applications to foreign language instruction
There is a growing consensus among applied linguists that foreign language learning benefits from activities that raise learners’ awareness of the properties of language. The question now is what activities might be particularly fruitful in this regard. This presentation turns to Cognitive Linguistics (CL) as a source of inspiration. Cognitive linguists consider language and its use as a reflection of general cognitive processes, mediated by culture. Instead of treating language as arbitrary, they seek plausible explanations for its characteristics. When applied to language pedagogy, the very question of why the target language packages a particular message in a certain way has the potential to stimulate learners’ cognitive engagement and to enhance their awareness of an array of linguistic phenomena.
In this talk, I will first focus on two theoretical postulates from CL that have important implications for foreign language instruction: the reappraisal of the role of figurative language in communicative exchanges and the notion of linguistic motivation. I will, then, review some of the proposals that have been put forward to introduce insights from Cognitive Linguistics to foreign language teaching, and the body of classroom research in which those proposals have been put to the test.
A major part of the presentation will be devoted to the discussion of the design of materials and classroom activities that incorporate insights from CL, but that at the same time need to take on board insights from mainstream research in the field of foreign language teaching. After all, a CL-informed approach to language teaching is not meant to replace already well-established teaching methods, but rather to complement those. Finally, some recommendations for further explorations of the potential and merits of Cognitive Linguistics for language pedagogy will be discussed.
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