Applying Cognitive Linguistics in the English Language Classroom

Shows language teachers how critical insights from cognitive linguistics research can help them design and implement effective pedagogical activities

This book promotes greater interest in cognitive linguistics (CL) among English language teaching (ELT) practitioners, while offering researchers a more direct line toward shaping pedagogy. The book presents a collection of CL-informed ready-to-use pedagogical summaries and activities that teachers without background knowledge in CL can take directly to their classrooms. Importantly, the book targets traditionally challenging areas of English instruction by focusing on vocabulary, grammar, and aspects of discourse and pragmatics.

Each chapter tackles a different topic of the English language and includes the following sections: 1) introduction of the challenge(s) with the said English language topic, 2) explanation of the CL approach and how it can mitigate the observed challenge(s), 3) practically-oriented description of the CL-inspired teaching activities, positioned within a specific pedagogical context but easily transferable to other contexts. All chapters include insights that are highly practical and easily implemented in different contexts of ELT. The ultimate goal of the volume is to motivate teachers to try new pedagogical tools and to influence English language pedagogy through the research-documented powers of applied cognitive linguistics.