Embodied experience and the teaching and learning of L2 prepositions : a case study of abstract in and on

• How can body-world knowledge be used to facilitate the teaching and learning of abstract L2 prepositions? What role do learners' embodied understandings of the abstract relationships that are construed by means of the prepositions play? How can the teaching and learning of prepositions be made fun?This chapter discusses the results of two corpus linguistic analyses of abstract in and on instances (Johansson Falck 2014, in press) as well as two small-scale, qualitative studies in which Swedish L2 learners of English were asked to discuss, draw and gesture their embodied understandings of some of the categories of abstract in and on instances that fell from the corpus data.The corpus analyses show that abstract in and on instances fall into categories of related concepts that are systematically related to specific types of body-world knowledge. Some types of abstract concepts are consistently construed as containers (used with in), and others as supporting surfaces (used with on). The subsequent interventions with the Swedish L2 learners then showed that discussions about the embodied motivations for the categories of abstract in and on instances are useful starting points for learning the patterns of abstract in and on in a playful, creative and collaborative way. The learners' self-reports suggest that the approach has positive effects on learning.

Ämnesord

HUMANIORA  -- Språk och litteratur -- Studier av enskilda språk (hsv//swe)

HUMANITIES  -- Languages and Literature -- Specific Languages (hsv//eng)

Nyckelord

body-world knowledge

embodied motivations

prepositions

abstract concepts

in

on

L2

English

discussions

drawings

language studies

språkvetenskap

language teaching and learning

språkdidaktik

Publikations- och innehållstyp

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kap (ämneskategori)