Microsoft Word - Crossroads 35.doc ………................................................................................CROSSROADS. A JOURNAL OF ENGLISH STUDIES 35 (2021) (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) 57 Book reviews DANIEL KARCZEWSKI1 DOI: 10.15290/CR.2021.35.4.04 University of Białystok, Poland https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8255-6018 Foreign Language Pedagogy in the Light of Cognitive Linguistics Research (Series Second Language Learning and Teaching), edited by Grzegorz Drożdż and Barbara Taraszka-Drożdż, Cham, Switzerland: Springer, 2020, 131pp. ISBN: 978-3-030-58774-1. EUR 48.14 The volume under discussion includes a collection of papers that use insights from Cognitive Linguistics (CL) to illuminate various issues in language pedagogy. The book is divided into two parts, each comprising several chapters that focus on two different sub-themes, such as cognitive underpinnings of language teaching and pedagogical applications of cognitive theories. As such the collection of studies reviewed here reflects a wider trend in scholarship that investigates the intersection of CL and language pedagogy within the realm of an applied cognitive framework. The first part of the book opens with a discussion by Paul Wilson and Barbara Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk on how the presence of a native or non-native teacher in an L2 class can affect students’ emotions. The chapter begins with a concise summary of studies on emotions, such as shame, fear, hopelessness, anxiety, anger, and pride, with respect to L2 learning and highlights how these emotions might influence L2 students. Some of the negative effects include withdrawal and avoidance tendencies, lower grades, or a decline in working memory performance. The results of the questionnaire-based study conducted by the authors seem to indicate that in the native versus non-native scenario it is the former that would elicit more negative emotions, anxiety in particular. The statistical analysis, however, showed no significant differences between these two scenarios in respect to the remaining emotions that were examined. In the second chapter, Katarzyna Kwapisz-Osadnik employs the Langackerian (1987) notion of imagery to propose her own theoretical model, referred to as global visualization grammar, with a view to showing how to teach tenses and moods in French more effectively. The model outlined proposes that students must be made familiar with some basic concepts, such as imagery, conceptualization, scene, or the theory of mental spaces (Fauconnier, 1985), before proper teaching can begin. The model assumes the simultaneous presentation of all tenses and moods with the help of drawings. In the last 1 Address for correspondence: University of Białystok, Faculty of Philology, Centre for Linguistic Studies, Pl. NZS 1, 15-420 Białystok, Poland. E-mail: dakar@uwb.edu.pl ………................................................................................CROSSROADS. A JOURNAL OF ENGLISH STUDIES 35 (2021) (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) 58 section, Kwapisz-Osadnik summarizes the advantages of the model, which, for instance, prevents “the automatization of the so-called prototypical tenses and moods” (p. 26) and thus allows learners to be more flexible in their constructional repertoire. The first part of the book concludes with a chapter by Grzegorz Drożdż, who takes advantage of some of the notions in Langacker’s Cognitive Grammar (CG); they include epistemic distance, granularity and scope in presenting tenses, and conditional clauses in a unified account. The bulk of the chapter concentrates on a comparison of the past and present uses of the constructions, present simple, present continuous, past simple, and past continuous, to achieve this goal. The chapter also discusses several pedagogical implications that stem from the treatment of the constructions in question in a unified manner, and this might be helpful in overcoming some general challenges that ESL/EFL learners face when mastering tenses. On the whole, the chapter convincingly illustrates that a handful of CL concepts has the potential to improve the treatment of this troublesome aspect of English grammar. The second part of the book commences with a chapter by Agnieszka Kaleta, who puts the cognitively oriented treatment of post-verbal complementation to the test to determine its effectiveness. Given the fact that the body of literature on the topic is peppered with inconsistencies, I would consider the chapter’s succinct presentation of the cognitive linguistic account of verb patterns to be one of its strengths. The empirical part of the chapter focuses on the research study design, participants recruited, and results, which are underpinned by some statistical evidence that strengthens the validity of the findings. Kaleta showed that the experimental treatment (CL-style intervention) was more effective than the standard treatment in the control group; however, it remains to be seen whether the results can be extrapolated beyond the sample studied. The following chapter by Barbara Taraszka-Drożdż—the only lexically oriented study in this volume—discusses a lexical technique that aims to help “grasp the nuances of meaning that are revealed by a linguistic unit in different contexts” (p. 82). The chapter begins with a discussion of the CG account of polysemy and is followed by an explication of the five-step technique that is embedded in Langacker’s (1987) network model. The technique, which can be used in foreign language classes when learners encounter unfamiliar words, is illustrated with three case studies of French lexical units accompanied by visually pleasing illustrations. The last part of the chapter addresses the advantages of the technique, one of which is that it encourages learners to reorganize their word association networks, which can be of value to foreign language learners. The penultimate chapter by Aleksandra Paliczuk proposes an alternative to teaching Italian prepositions to Polish learners whereby a relationship between a preposition and objects or concepts is brought to the fore. The study takes its theoretical inspirations from Langacker’s CG (1987), the notion of imagery in particular. The first part of the chapter addresses the standard treatment of prepositions in Italian grammar with its focus on formal classifications of objects and adverbials. Then, Paliczuk lays the cognitive foundations for the alternative treatment of prepositions in Italian by discussing in turn spatial, temporal, and abstract uses of prepositions. The discussion is exemplified with the diagrams illustrating relations between a given preposition and objects or concepts. The final part of the chapter comprises sample exercises (gap-fills and a translation task) that could be used to address the shortcomings of the standard teaching of Italian prepositions. ………................................................................................CROSSROADS. A JOURNAL OF ENGLISH STUDIES 35 (2021) (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) 59 The last chapter in this volume, by Łukasz Matusz, argues that teaching phonetics and phonology at the university level could benefit from the implementation of some elements of the Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT). This idea is first explored from the theoretical standpoint by means of a literature review, which shows that CMT has played an important role in various areas of language pedagogy. Then various extensions of the metaphor LANGUAGE IS MUSIC are presented to demonstrate their potential for teaching phonetics and phonology. More specifically, by showing analogies between two domains, LANGUAGE and MUSIC, students will better understand phonetic and phonological notions. The empirical part of the study discusses a research design that uses a questionnaire as a data collection tool. Seventy-three students were requested to provide definitions of some notions such as phonemes, stress, or intonation, and as a result, the questionnaire collected 438 definitions. The results of the study showed that 11 students came up with 22 definitions in which manifestations of the LANGUAGE IS MUSIC metaphor can be identified. More than a decade ago, Pütz (2007: 1143) predicted that two CL theories, Langacker’s CG and Lakoff and Johnson’s theory of metaphor (1980), would be likely to emerge in the applied cognitive framework. By looking solely at this volume, one can say that this prediction came true. Five out of seven chapters in this book are grounded in the most comprehensive theory of grammar within the CL enterprise, and the cognitive view of metaphor provides a theoretical account for another one. Interestingly, if we take a cursory look at the last decade of research investigating the effectiveness of CL-style interventions on grammar and vocabulary that is available on the Scopus and Web of Science databases, this prediction also fares well. Therefore, on the one hand, the comprehensiveness of these two theories has been proved, and on the other hand, it has also been proved that each theory is “an important empirical test” (Langacker 2008: 8). From a cognitive linguistic perspective, language is seen as “systematic and governed by regular processes” (Tyler 2017: 75). This assumption manifests itself quite strongly in the contributions in this volume: the studies here emphasize the meaning- driven approach to language teaching and learning rather than rote memorization. Hopefully, in the long run this assumption might lead to a reduction in the dogma of arbitrariness looming over the classroom. The studies in the present volume also do well in terms of the visual representation of meaning in the drawings and diagrams that they utilize. This is perhaps the most perceptually salient reflex of embodiment (Tyler 2017: 77) in CL-oriented L2 learning, which tends to rely on diagrams and drawings to facilitate, for instance, the discovery of schematic grammatical meanings. The effectiveness of this type of instruction has been demonstrated by some scholars (e.g., Tyler, Mueller & Ho 2010), thus giving support to the dual coding theory (Paivio 1986); however, it requires further empirical testing. Another assumption, which manifests itself to a lesser degree in this volume, is the need for explicating “the differences between the target language and the learner’s first language” (Pütz 2007: 1151), which, as Soffritti and Dirven (2004) argue, might facilitate language learning. In consequence, by allowing learners to grasp the cross-linguistic contrasts between the target language and the first language, L2 learning might become easier for them. Following Achard (2018), the editors of the volume under review note in their introduction that applied CL research “is still below its potential” (Drożdż & Taraszka- ………................................................................................CROSSROADS. A JOURNAL OF ENGLISH STUDIES 35 (2021) (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) 60 Drożdż 2020: vii). Curiously, a comment along similar lines was made by Luo (2021: 264), who, following Pütz (2007), states that “applied CL is still in its infancy.” One might wonder why, despite more than thirty years of applied CL research, sentiments like these are frequently expressed. To my mind, an answer to this question was elucidated by several scholars (Boers 2013; Littlemore 2009; Tyler 2017), who argue, for instance, for the need for longitudinal rather than small-scale studies or distributive learning to determine the effectiveness of cognitively inspired L2 research. Others (e.g., Boers 2011), based on their assessment of CL-oriented studies, offer a ready-made checklist of methodological flaws that bring studies’ conclusions into question. Some of the flaws include the absence of (1) pre-tests, (2) delayed post-tests, or (3) detailed quantitative data. Although Boers (2011) evaluated only CL-oriented vocabulary research, the list of the identified shortcomings could be used as a checklist for grammar-oriented interventions, as well. Taking the above into account, only two of the studies in this volume, one by Wilson and Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk and another by Kaleta, employed any statistical methods to determine the validity of their hypotheses. I believe that some of the claims and arguments expressed in the remaining chapters might be strengthened by adopting a more experimental approach to the phenomena under investigation and thus take the studies to a new level of refinement. This is a much needed development if applied CL research is to reach its maturity and fulfill its full potential soon. To sum up, Foreign Language Pedagogy in the Light of Cognitive Linguistics Research covers a wide range of topics that could be of interest to researchers working at the intersection of CL and language pedagogy. One of the strengths of this volume is its inclusion of chapters by researchers investigating CL-oriented learning in languages other than English. It is my hope that future work will also explore the role of L2 teachers, who are often unfamiliar with applied CL research, to promulgate its ideas. References Achard, M. 2018. Teaching usage and concepts: Toward a cognitive pedagogical grammar. In: A. Tyler, H. Lihong, & H. Jan (eds.), What is applied cognitive linguistics? Answers from SLA research, 37-62. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Boers, F. 2011. Cognitive Semantic ways of teaching figurative phrases: An assessment. Review of Cognitive Linguistics 9(1): 227-261. https://doi.org/10.1075/rcl.9.1.11boe Boers, F. 2013. Cognitive Linguistic approaches to teaching vocabulary: Assessment and integration. Language Teaching 46(2): 208-224. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0261444811000450 Drożdż, G., & Taraszka-Drożdż, B. (eds.). 2020. Foreign Language Pedagogy in the Light of Cognitive Linguistics Research. Cham, Switzerland: Springer. Fauconnier, G. 1985. Mental spaces: Aspects of meaning construction in natural language. Cambridge (United Kingdom)/New York/Melbourne: Cambridge University Press. Lakoff, G., & Johnson, M. 1980. Metaphors We Live by. Chicago/London: University of ………................................................................................CROSSROADS. A JOURNAL OF ENGLISH STUDIES 35 (2021) (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) 61 Chicago Press. Langacker, R. W. 1987. Foundations of Cognitive Grammar:Vol.1: Theoretical Prerequisites. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press. Langacker, R. W. 2008. The relevance of Cognitive Grammar for language pedagogy. In: S. De Knop & T. De Rycker (eds.), Cognitive Approaches to Pedagogical Grammar, 7-35. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Littlemore, J. 2009. Applying Cognitive Linguistics to Second Language Learning and Teaching. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Luo, H. 2021. Cognitive Linguistics and Second Language Acquisition. In: X. Wen & J. R. Taylor (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics, 556-567. New York/London: Routledge. Paivio, A. 1986. Mental Representations: A Dual Coding Approach. New York: Oxford University Press. Pütz, M. 2007. Cognitive linguistics and applied linguistics. In: D. Geeraerts & H. Cuyckens (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics, 1139-1159. Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press. Soffritti, M., & Dirven, R. 2004. Comparing languages: Language classification, typology, and contrastive linguistics. In: R. Dirven & M. Verspoor (eds.), Cognitive Exploration of Language and Linguistics, 231-268. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Tyler, A. 2017. Second language acquisition. In: B. Dancygier (ed.), The Cambridge Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics, 73-90. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Tyler, A., Mueller, C. M., & Ho, V. 2010. Applying cognitive linguistics to instructed L2 learning: The English modals. AILA Review 23 (December 2010), 30-49. https://doi.org/10.1075/aila.23.03tyl *** Daniel Karczewski is an Associate Professor in the Center for Linguistic Studies at the University of Białystok, Poland. He was the prize winner of the Polish Cognitive Linguistics Association competition for the best Ph.D. dissertation in cognitive linguistics in 2014. He is the author of Generyczność w języku i w myśleniu. Studium kognitywne (Genericity in Language and Thought. A Cognitive Study). His current research interests include the generic overgeneralization effect and the phenomenon of normativity.