인지의미론 관점에서 바라본 영화영어 연구

A study of movie English from the perspective of cognitive semantics: With reference to the movie, Words and Pictures

The purpose of this paper is two-fold: (a) to present a theoretical orientation for college-level EFL teachers to improve their teaching of English through movies, and (b) to observe what kinds of strategies EFL students use when comprehending movie scripts. Accordingly, ideas from cognitive semantics (such as conceptualization, embodiment, simulation, and fictive motion) have been utilized. The American movie, Words and Pictures (Schepisi, 2013) was chosen as the source material, and three graduate school students in English education participated in the study. Each participant studied a different scene, from which they reported the sentences and phrases that they did not understand. The participants were allowed to use dictionaries and other resources. Then, the researcher explained the unknown sentences and phrases from the perspective of cognitive semantics. The results showed that all the participants depended mainly on dictionary meanings of words and phrases to facilitate comprehension of the movie scenes. However, they mostly ignored the contexts in which the expressions occurred within the scenes. In addition, this study indicates that applying concepts from cognitive semantics to understand and analyze the meanings in movies scripts may be a new teaching method in EFL classrooms.