The embodied teaching of complex verbal constructions with German placement verbs and spatial prepositions

Abstract

In recent years, foreign language pedagogy has recognized the need to focus (i) on larger meaningful sequences of words (Nattinger & DeCarrico, 1992; Wray, 2002; Ellis & Cadierno, 2009; Gonzalez Rey, 2013) and (ii) further on communicative goals (Nunan, 1991; Widdowson, 1992; Savignon, 2000). Difficulties in the learning process of a foreign language result from the conceptual and constructional differences between expressions in the native and foreign language. Teaching materials often propose a lexical approach with an unstructured set of constructed examples. With the postulate of meaningful schematic templates, Construction Grammar (CxG) has a number of assets for foreign language teaching (FLT) and learning (FLL), it allows among others to establish a structured inventory of abstract constructions with prototypical exemplars and inheritance links between the constructions’ instantiations. To be proficient in a foreign language also means to use new words in constructions. Learners can be asked to extend the use of new lexical units as slot-fillers into constructional patterns. This is exemplified with the use of German posture and placement verbs in the caused motion construction and the corresponding intransitive locative construction. But having learned a vast number of constructional templates of a language does not automatically imply that learners can produce L2-constructions and their instantiations in a creative way. Therefore, CxG must be enriched with further insights from Cognitive Linguistics which claims that conceptual categories and their linguistic expressions are the result of embodied processes (Lakoff, 1987). This chapter makes some suggestions for interactive activities which can foster ‘embodied teaching and learning’.

I still don't get it: Easy versus difficult grammar in intermediate German

“…This topic was assigned to Unit 6. Instruction was modeled after approaches common to intermediate textbooks: Students were asked to memorize a list, a lexical approach roundly critiqued by De Knop (2020). It is therefore unsurprising that students struggled.…”

“…Ways out of this conundrum are offered by Vyatkina (2016), whose corpus‐ and input‐driven approach to verbs with fixed prepositions led to better learning gains than the lexical approach, and cognition grammar approaches by Suñer and Roche (2019) and De Knop (2020) that used embodiment as a framework for teaching light verb constructions (Suñer & Roche) and placement verbs with spatial prepositions (De Knop). Similar insights might be applied to verbs with fixed prepositions.…”

“…Many previous studies have provided useful information on the ease or difficulty of specific grammar structures. To name but a handful, Arnett and Martin (2004) found that intermediate students generally select the correct auxiliary verb when forming the perfect; Liamkina (2008) found that formally accurate and semantically and discursively appropriate use of the case system is difficult even for advanced learners; Walter and MacWhinney (2015) found that explicit rule‐driven instruction could help adult L2 learners use morphological cues to determine grammatical gender; Fagan (2019) proposed teaching learners to consider syllable stress and phonetic features when learning the superlative; and De Knop (2020) had success using embodiment to teach verbs with fixed prepositions.…”

Captions and learnability factors in learning grammar from audio-visual input

“…Diessel, 2004;Goldberg, 2006), several researchers have explored L2 learning through the lens of constructions as well (e.g. De Knop, 2020;Kusyk & Sockett, 2012;Römer & Garner, 2019). Successful learning of L2 constructions depends on a number of different factors, as evidenced in several studies (Ellis & Cadierno, 2009;Ellis & Collins, 2009;Ellis et al, 2016).…”