발견학습을 위한 인지언어학 기반 영어 어휘지도

A cognitive linguistic approach to English vocabulary teaching for discovery learning: Focused on the meanings of prepositions and verbs

Cognitive linguistics presupposes that language is not arbitrary but grounded in human experience with the world, and that multiple meanings of a lexical item evolve from extensions of its prototypical or core meaning via metaphor and metonymy. The present study proposes that a cognitive linguistic approach to vocabulary learning and teaching can facilitate Korean learners of English effectively to construct the meanings of polysemous words which have no clear L1 equivalents. It first presents a rationale for adopting a cognitive linguistic approach to teaching the meanings of high-frequency polysemous prepositions and verbs. It then presents sample classroom activities for teaching the preposition on and the polysemous verb play, which are designed to integrate assisted discovery learning into the cognitive linguistic approach. In the activities, teachers scaffold learners to experience and discover the core meanings of on and play by themselves going through the processes of hypothesizing and validating the core meanings and expanding the expressions into different contexts. It finally proposes that this approach can benefit Korean learners of English by reducing their cognitive burden of blind memorization and by fostering their capacities of insightful learning to actively construct new semantic structures in L2.