The discovery that several figurative idioms are semantically motivated by a common conceptual metaphor (CM) has opened up a path to more systematic and insightful learning. However, it was still unclear to what extent the elaboration of conceptual metaphors (CMs) could facilitate learners’ reception and production of idioms over time. To address this issue, a quasi-experiment was conducted, with the pre-test – post-test design, on a sample of 69 Vietnamese undergraduates. Results revealed that the explanation of CM was especially beneficial for the students’ idiom reception over time, and to a lesser extent for their use of idioms. Though not outstanding in the short term compared with the traditional method, this cognitive approach showed its relatively long-lasting value in terms of both idiom reception and production.
Contrary to the traditional view of idioms, cognitive linguists have demonstrated that the nature of idioms is not arbitrary and rote memorization is not the only way to learn them. The discovery of conceptual metaphor (CM) and its application to teaching idiomatic language in EFL has opened up a new path to more systematic and perceptive learning. However, the learners’ attitudes towards the employment of conceptual metaphors have yet to be thoroughly explored. To address this issue, the current study aimed to investigate the attitudes of 106 Vietnamese university students towards the CM-inspired instruction after a five-week treatment. Two research instruments were employed in this study: an attitudinal questionnaire and a semi-structured interview. The results of the study reveal that the CM-inspired instruction received positive feedback from the students, though the instruction itself exposed some shortcomings that need to be dealt with. To overcome its shortcomings, actual pictures and activities for structural elaboration are proposed to be used concurrently with the CM-inspired instruction.
According to the Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT), metaphors are pervasive in everyday life, and most novel poetic metaphors are developed from conventional metaphors. Several examples and explanations have been provided to support these assertions; however, there has yet to be a systematic investigation into the conventionality and novelty of metaphors in literature. To partly fill in these gaps, the present study aims to explore which conceptual metaphors of love are frequently employed in British and American love poems and how the poets adapt them to bring novelty to their works. Love, one of the most highly metaphorised concepts, was chosen as the topic of the metaphors in this study, for there is a considerable resource of love poems available to be explored. The findings of the study reveal that there are nine conventional conceptual metaphors of love employed in British and American love poems. The conventionality and novelty of metaphors in poetry were then analysed in their respective poetic contexts, focusing on how the poets have adopted four techniques (extending, elaboration, questioning, and combining) to create novel expressions from conventional language. This study indicates that the knowledge of conceptual metaphors can help a person, especially a learner of a foreign language, to interpret poetic metaphors in literary contexts.
Collocational competence is of critical importance to EFL learners’ language proficiency. Due to limited research on L1 influence on L2 learners’ development of receptive and productive knowledge of adjective + noun collocations, especially in the context of Vietnam, this study is an attempt to address these gaps by investigating whether Vietnamese learners could recognize and use congruent English adjective + noun collocations more accurately than incongruent ones. Data were collected from 72 English-major undergraduates in a Vietnamese university who completed three collocational tests: the Receptive Knowledge Test, the Productive Knowledge Test, and the paragraph-writing test. Results showed that, in contrast to language transfer theory, congruent collocations posed considerably more problems for the students in identifying the well-formed lexical combinations and using them accurately in writing. These findings highlight the importance of explicitly teaching congruent and incongruent collocations in EFL classrooms.
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