Applying Cognitive Linguistics to the teaching Chinese as a foreign language: The case of gesticulation and temporal expressions
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| Year of publication | 2023 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
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| Description | The presentation introduces the basics of Cognitive Linguistics and its potential application to teaching Chinese as a foreign language, presenting a case study of gesticulation in the teaching of temporal expressions in Chinese. As has been extensively investigated, human understanding of abstract concepts is highly culture-specific (Shafirian 2011) and can be observed in daily language use (Lakoff and Johnson 1980), with certain lexical expressions in a language forming an overarching pattern of thought called a conceptual metaphor in that particular language. Among all the abstract concepts, TIME has been one of the most well-investigated; it has been reported that in Chinese, the metaphorical understanding of TIME is different partly vertical (Yu 2012), which is lexically instantiated by ? ?/??, ??/??, ???/???, ???/???, among numerous other expressions, rather than purely horizontal (as in the other languages such as Czech and English). In other words, the Chinese understanding of the passage of TIME seems to be partly based on the UP-DOWN orientation, which may pose a potential difficulty to learners of Chinese as a foreign language. In the field of language pedagogy, use of gestures in the language classroom has been identified as an effective strategy (Macedonia et. al 2012; Salvato 2015). However, no research has been found to correlate the effectiveness of gesticulation in the teaching of temporal expressions that involve a conceptual metaphor specific to the target language, which constitutes the issue that our research will deal with. To tease out the influence of gesticulation, we will run an experiment with two groups of beginning students of Chinese, one being taught the temporal expressions with conscious gesticulation and the other without. A test on the knowledge related to the target temporal expressions (among other distractors) will be administered right after the teaching to study the effectiveness of the teaching. The same test will be run in a couple of weeks for the retention rate. We expect the research to contribute to the area of teaching Chinese as a foreign language by testing the usefulness of principles in Cognitive Linguistics in the design of teaching materials and lesson plans. |