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This paper reports on a quasi-experimental study investigating the effect of cognitive linguistics-grounded instruction on learning the prepositions in, on, and at, which are known to pose tremendous difficulty to English language learners due to their language-specific features and polysemous nature. The participants (N = 44) were adolescent learners at a school in Indonesia. They were assigned into the cognitive group and the rule group. The cognitive group was presented with pictorial representations of the prepositions and cognitive tools used to motivate non-spatial uses, while the rule group was provided with rules. Participants’ performance on the three uses (i.e. spatial, temporal and abstract) was measured with pre-, post-, and delayed post-tests in a form of gap filling. The study yielded mixed results. The findings demonstrate that the cognitive group outperformed the rule group in the overall immediate and delayed post-tests. The cognitive group improved significantly in the immediate post-test; however, the positive effect did not last until the delayed post-test. On the other hand, the rule group gained a little in the immediate post-test, but the group’s performance decreased significantly in the delayed post-test. Although there was no indication of long-term effects of the cognitive instruction, the results still indicate a value of applying cognitive linguistics to teaching the prepositions, and thus lend support to the applicability of cognitive linguistic theory in second language instruction.

The English tense and aspect system has long posed great difficulty to second language (L2) learners due to their underlying complex concepts. This difficulty is compounded by oversimplified grammatical descriptions found in many ELT textbooks. Cognitive Grammar (CG) offers comprehensive accounts of tenses that could be useful for learners. This paper reports a quasiexperimental study investigating the differential effects of CG-informed form-focused instruction and formalist-traditional form-focused instruction on the acquisition of two English tenses, namely the simple past and the past perfect. Secondary school EFL learners (final pool: N = 36) were assigned to two groups (CG and Traditional). Learners in the CG group were exposed to CG-grounded grammatical descriptions of the tenses while learners in the traditional group received traditional accounts. Both groups performed awareness-raising tasks to enhance learning. Data were gathered from the learners' performance in a cloze narrative task. Results from an immediate post-test revealed that CG-based descriptions helped learners improve significantly and outperform learners in the traditional group. These findings indicate the superiority of a CG approach to a formalist approach to teaching the tenses and lend support to the applicability and efficacy of CG-grounded form-focused instruction in the classroom.

Little research has explored the effects of socio-demographic and technological factors on university lecturers ' Technological, Pedagogical, and Content Knowledge (TPACK). Conducted in the context of emergency remote learning during the pandemic, the mixed-methods study reported on this paper examined Indonesian lecturers' TPACK during the emergency online teaching, and how their gender, length of teaching experience, prior platform training, and mostly used platform affected their TPACK. 555 lecturers from different parts of Indonesia participated in the e-survey used in this study. Follow-up semi-structured interviews were conducted with ten of the participants. Results revealed that the lecturers' pedagogical and content knowledge components were higher than their technological knowledge components. Findings also showed that gender and mostly used platform affected TK, whereas teaching experience affected pedagogical (PK) and content knowledge (CK). Prior platform training did not affect TPACK. Further, the absence of Learning Management Systems (LMS) forced some to use social media platforms to conduct remote teaching, impacting their TK, impacting their TK. Given the low TK levels, it is suggested that higher education institutions increase the use of online learning platforms (e.g., LMS) and technologies (e.g., augmented reality and virtual reality technologies, which will be highly useful especially for practice-based courses).

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