Proceedings of the Constructionist Approaches to Language Pedagogy (CALP) Conference, 8-9 November 2013

The notion of Construction Grammar (CxG) covers a wide range of grammatical theoretical models, all of them sharing the central tenet that constructions are the basic units of language. The interest for constructionist approaches of language started with Fillmore, Kay & O’Connor’s (1988) seminal paper on ‘let alone’ and received its first book-length treatment in Goldberg’s (1995) Constructions: A Construction Grammar Approach to Argument Structure. In the last few years CxG has gradually grown into a powerful descriptive and processing model which is now well-accepted in the scientific world. Current research within the framework of CxG has mainly adopted a theoretical or descriptive approach, focussing on the principles of CxG, comparing it with other linguistic theories (e.g. valency theory), describing specific constructions (e.g. the well-known caused-motion construction or the ditransitive construction, to name just a few) or illustrating some of the CxG principles at work in constructions in different languages. The applied perspective, on the other hand, that is the question of how applied areas like translation studies or language teaching or acquisition can benefit from a CxG-based approach, has been largely neglected up to now, except for a few rare studies which have demonstrated the potential of using CxG for applied purposes and have provided interesting insights into the learning and teaching of constructions. However, they have only scratched the surface of constructionist applications, and many aspects of ‘applied construction grammar’ still remain to be explored. The aim of this conference is to bring together researchers applying CxG (and CxG-inspired approaches) to language pedagogy, which we understand here in a broad sense as covering foreign language teaching, but also foreign language learning and second language acquisition