Abstract
The study reported in the present chapter explores the effects of teaching, on the basis of their Cognitive Grammar (CG) descriptions, the meanings, use as well as form of the tense/aspect pairings known from traditional pedagogical grammar as the present simple and the present continuous and compares them with the effects of teaching based on traditional pedagogical descriptions. The account of the study includes a full-blown description of the treatment based on CG, which is a pioneering example of pedagogical practice exploiting CG descriptions of grammatical phenomena. As a result of applying mainly quantitative and complementing it with some qualitative analysis of the data obtained in the course of a quasi-experimental study, it is concluded that explicit form-focused instruction based on CG descriptions, which brought about gains comparable to those secured by traditional instruction, may be at least moderately effective with respect to fostering learners’ explicit grammatical knowledge. This may be explained by CG’s emphasis on the meaningfulness of grammar and its use of pictorial representations of the meanings of grammatical features.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
A concise description of the study including certain aspects of its design, participants, target forms, instructional treatment, handling of data as well as results an their discussion (restricted to the results of the entire written test) appeared in Bielak and Pawlak (2011).
- 2.
The numbers symbolizing individual participants in Table 5.2 are not haphazard and reflect their ordering in the charts of Figs. 5.21 and 5.22 included in Sect. 5.8.1.4.
- 3.
As stated in note 17 in Sect. 3.3, the perfective/imperfective aspectual distinction in Slavic studies (and languages) is not the same as the CG classification of verbs using the same terms.
- 4.
- 5.
Not all the slides used in the presentation are reproduced here. For the whole Power Point presentation see Appendix C.
- 6.
Just as in some of the earlier figures, in Fig. 5.17 the Polish word zdanie (sentence) refers to the example sentence in the figure.
- 7.
All the participants’ comments and responses cited were translated from Polish by the present authors, as the questionnaire was entirely in Polish.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2013 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Bielak, J., Pawlak, M. (2013). Applying Cognitive Grammar in the Classroom: Teaching English Tense and Aspect. In: Applying Cognitive Grammar in the Foreign Language Classroom. Second Language Learning and Teaching. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-27455-8_5
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-27455-8_5
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-642-27454-1
Online ISBN: 978-3-642-27455-8
eBook Packages: Humanities, Social Sciences and LawEducation (R0)