Abstract
This study aims to apply basic concepts in cognitive linguistics to teaching English idioms to EFL students. English idioms expose their inherent difficulties to EFL learners because people of different languages usually have different conceptualizations. Words in idioms do not carry their literal but conceptualized semantics. Cognitive linguistics, grounded in cognitive, social, and communicative theories, hypothesize idioms as examples of conceptual metaphors. Twelve idioms about finance were taught to 50 Vietnamese first-year EFL college students divided into two experimental groups for CL-based treatment and treatment for rote-learning, and one control group with no treatment. The experimental groups received 4-step treatments: warm-up, instruction, drill practice, and productive task. The results showed that the group receiving CL-based treatment outperformed the group applying rote-learning in both immediate posttest and delayed posttest s for receptive and productive knowledge of the instructed idioms. The control group did not make any significant gain from the prettest to the posttest s . The results suggest that students’ awareness of conceptual metaphors help them remember the target items long. Further studies can include measures of both explicit and implicit knowledge of the idioms as a result of CL-based treatment in other contexts. Keywords: conceptual metaphors; idioms; EFL students; cognitive linguistics; semantic motivation
Highlights
THE RATIONALEEnglish language teaching has undergone numerous additions of empirical findings from studies in English language teaching (e.g. Chen & Lin 2018), second language acquisition (e.g. Kobayashi 2018), and applied linguistics (Hung 2017)
This study aimed to explore the effects of Cognitive linguistics (CL)-based teaching of English idioms to English as a foreign language (EFL) students and compare its effects and the effects of the teaching of idioms based on rotelearning
The findings showed that the students who made sense of the conceptual metaphor (CM) encoded in the idioms outperformed those who only learned the idioms without knowing the CM in the idioms
Summary
THE RATIONALEEnglish language teaching has undergone numerous additions of empirical findings from studies in English language teaching (e.g. Chen & Lin 2018), second language acquisition (e.g. Kobayashi 2018), and applied linguistics (Hung 2017). Kobayashi 2018), and applied linguistics (Hung 2017) These studies have made attempts to explore the effects of applications of technology in English language learning, the impacts of metacognitive intervention on listening competence of students learning English as a foreign language (EFL), and the effectiveness of applying cognitive linguistics to teaching the metaphorical meanings of English prepositions. Idioms used to be considered examples of figurative language. They expose some inherent characteristics difficult for EFL students to learn. It is accepted by some schools of linguistics that idioms are figurative fixed expressions. The meanings of idioms could not be explained Regarding these so-called characteristics of idioms, EFL students are asked to learn them by heart
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