From Construction Grammar to embodied construction practice

In recent years, foreign language pedagogy has recognized the need to focus (i) on larger meaningful sequences of words (Wong Fillmore 1976; 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. In Goldberg’s (1995 & 2006) Construction Grammar (CxG) larger meaningful sequences are constructions, i.e. entrenched form-meaning mappings resulting from generalization and schematization. The Construction Grammar model has a number of assets for foreign language teaching (FLT) and learning (FLL). 1. With the postulate of meaningful schematic templates, CxG makes it possible to establish a structured inventory of abstract constructions with prototypical exemplars and inheritance links between the constructions’ instantiations. This will be illustrated with the inventory of German constructions with the preposition bis (‘up to’, ‘until’). 2. The L2-templates must then be practiced so that they can become entrenched. CxG focuses on non-compositional sequences of words which are similar to chunks. A methodology based on chunking (Ellis 2009: 147) fosters a “cognitive restructuring in the mind of bilinguals” (Athanasopoulos 2009: 92) or a “rethinking for speaking” (Robinson and Ellis 2008; Ellis and Cadierno 2009: 125). 3. But 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 will be exemplified with the use of German posture and placement verbs in the caused motion and the corresponding intransitive construction (see Ellis and Ferreira 2009). 4. Because CxG offers a more holistic approach, it allows to describe similar constructions in different domains, either literal or phraseological, like for instance with ditransitive phraseologisms (De Knop 2016). But having learned a vast number of constructional templates of a language does not automatically imply that the learner can produce L2-constructions and their instantiations in a creative way. Therefore, the CxG model 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). The talk will make some suggestions for interactive activities which can foster ‘embodied teaching and learning’