engleski

Figurative expressions in an online teaching environment

One of the central claims of cognitive linguistics is that various figurative expressions are motivated by cognitive mechanisms such as metaphor and metonymy. For instance, although the English idioms let the cat out of the bag 'reveal a secret' ; keep under one’s hat 'keep a secret' and behind closed doors 'where other people cannot know what is happening' have completely different lexical material, they all share a metaphorical connection between referring to a container as being open or closed and the availability of information. An open container means that a secret is revealed (that's the cat being let out of the bag), and a closed container (something under one's hat or behind closed doors) means that it remains hidden and unavailable. This type of information has been shown to be useful in face-to-face teaching, because it facilitates idiom retention (for an overview cf. Boers 2011), particularly if the learners are encouraged to make creative hypotheses about language, thus facilitating deeper processing. In this presentation, I explore to what extent this realization can be helpful in an online teaching environment. More specifically, I suggest that deeper processing can be facilitated by adopting an inductive, collaborative and reflexive approach to online teaching, i.e. through socioconstructivism. Given the fact that the research combining cognitive linguistics, figurative language and online teaching and learning is virtually non-existent, I will propose some ways in which teachers can use the action research spiral approach (for an overview see Hampel in press ) to designing online teaching materials and activities. References Boers, Frank. 2011. “Cognitive Semantic Ways of Teaching Figurative Phrases: An Assessment.” Review of Cognitive Linguistics 9 (1): 227–61. doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/rcl.9.1.11boe. Hampel, Regine. in press. "Approaches to research and implications for pedagogy". In Developing online language teaching skills: pedagogy, practice and reflexion, edited by Regine Hampel and Ursula Stickler. Palgrave Macmillan.

figurative expression; conceptual metaphor; socioconstructivism; onlie teaching

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