Abstract
Contrary to the traditional view of idioms, cognitive linguists have demonstrated that the nature of idioms is not arbitrary and rote memorization is not the only way to learn them. The discovery of conceptual metaphor (CM) and its application to teaching idiomatic language in EFL has opened up a new path to more systematic and perceptive learning. However, the learners’ attitudes towards the employment of conceptual metaphors have yet to be thoroughly explored. To address this issue, the current study aimed to investigate the attitudes of 106 Vietnamese university students towards the CM-inspired instruction after a five-week treatment. Two research instruments were employed in this study: an attitudinal questionnaire and a semi-structured interview. The results of the study reveal that the CM-inspired instruction received positive feedback from the students, though the instruction itself exposed some shortcomings that need to be dealt with. To overcome its shortcomings, actual pictures and activities for structural elaboration are proposed to be used concurrently with the CM-inspired instruction.
Highlights
Thai Bao Ngoc Pham Lecturer, Faculty of English Linguistics and Literature, University of Social Sciences and Humanities, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam
This section reports and discusses the results collected from the questionnaire and the interview regarding the students’ attitudes towards the employment of conceptual metaphors in teaching English idioms
Though there were a few drawbacks in terms of structural elaboration, image processing, and learners’ initial unfamiliarity with the application of conceptual metaphors, the results of this study reveal that the benefits of the CM-inspired instruction far outweighed its drawbacks in facilitating idiom acquisition
Summary
Thai Bao Ngoc Pham Lecturer, Faculty of English Linguistics and Literature, University of Social Sciences and Humanities, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. Since the 1980s, cognitive linguists have ascertained that idioms are not arbitrary and it is a conceptual metaphor that is the motivation behind the figurative meanings of several idiomatic expressions (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980; Kövecses, 2002) This finding has been an inspiration for several studies on the effect of conceptual metaphors on idiom acquisition (Khoshniyat & Dowlatabadi, 2014; Kartal & Uner, 2017; Pérez, 2018; Chen, 2019; Pham, 2019; Shan, 2020).
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