Teacher language awareness and cognitive linguistics (CL): building a CL-inspired perspective on teaching lexis in EFL student teachers

Abstract

It has been suggested recently that it may be useful for language teaching practitioners to have some knowledge of cognitive linguistics. Cognitive linguistics (CL) provides tools that may help the language-teaching practitioner to gain insight into the semantic potential of words and communicate the meaning of lexical chunks in greater detail and, with regard to collocations, with greater explanatory power. The present study sought to find out how student teachers respond to this approach. Prepositions and phrasal verbs have been chosen to demonstrate the applicability of concepts from CL to language pedagogy. Self-report data collected with the help of questionnaires and reflective writing tasks indicate that student teachers recognise benefits of a CL-inspired approach to foreign language vocabulary teaching. It is argued that applied CL can contribute to teachers’ language awareness (TLA) and that it can broaden the scope of lexical awareness. However, student teachers need practice in the analysis of concrete samples of language before they are able to create opportunities for insightful lexical learning on the basis of CL findings in the classroom.

Keywords:

• explicit instruction
• teacher language awareness
• teacher knowledge
• form-focused pedagogy
• lexical awareness
• teacher training