Comprehension of Body-Part Idioms of Emotions with CM-guided Instruction: A Comparative Study

• Main Authors: Wan-Yi Ye, 葉宛宜
• Other Authors: Ying-Hsueh Hu
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2010
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/16872064118148212253

碩士 === 淡江大學 === 英文學系碩士班 === 98 === Lakoff and Gibbs (1990, 1994) argued that most idiomatic expressions are conceptually motivated by the underlying metaphors and metonymies, which, according to Lakoff and Johnson (1980), derived from our embodied experiences. This insight has led to an alternative pedagogy proposed in this study to enhance idiom comprehension of EFL learners. This study aims to investigate the efficacy of a cognitive instruction involving explicating the underlying conceptual metaphors and metonymies (CM) of body-part idioms of emotions by comparing it with a more traditional approach that employs L1 translation with context cues, According to the result of a previous study (Hu & Fong, 2006), raising the awareness of CMs and ICs underlying idioms in the target language did facilitate learning; however, negative L1 transfer deriving from differences in cultural specific metonymies and image schemas would occur to interfere with comprehension. Some seemingly easy, i.e., transparent idioms such as giving someone the cold shoulder or having cold feet were not immediately understood both before and after teaching. Presumably, such difficulty might have been due to a lack of systematic explanation as the study only highlighted the underlying CMs and ICs rather than contrasting them systematically with proper categorizations. Thus, in this current study, three groups of subjects were recruited with two groups instructed with CM-guided cognitive instruction (CIM1, CIM2), and one group as the control group (TCM). Above all, one of the CM-guided groups (CIM2) had a further treatment of grouping emotions into different categorizations. A pool of 30 idioms related to emotions, such as anger, joy, fear, surprise, and sadness as well as body parts such as heart, hand, feet, mouth, head were selected from dictionaries and BNC (British National Corpus) for treatment.. 10 The results of this study suggest that subjects of the three groups, L1 translation with context cues (TCM), CIM1, and CIM2 with emotion categorizations, all improved significantly after respective treatment. However, from idiom long-term retention point of view, subjects of CIM2 performed slightly better, though not significantly, than the other two groups. This result indicates that any kinds of grouping lead to better than no grouping at all, and for the type of idioms used in the experiment, all tested approaches proved to be effective. For the 10 more cultural specific idioms, subjects of all three groups demonstrated an overall difficulty in learning, suggesting that cultural specific schemas are indeed harder to learn. The above findings indicate that CM-guided instructions for more universal or cultural-shared body-part idioms of emotions are equally helpful to L2 learners as a more traditional approach. This may have more to do with the transparent, bodily-motivated idiom type. Some limitations and suggestions were also discussed for future research.