The Impact Of Cognitive Instruction On English Idiom Acquisition By Second Language Learners

As an important metaphorical linguistic phenomenon, English idioms carry a largeamount of information both literally and culturally. They constitute a major and crucialpart of English language and also play a key role in achieving native-like expressions.In the traditional view, idioms are dead metaphors. They are regarded as a specialset of the larger category of words, that is, as “long” words or prefabricated chunks.People lay more emphases on rote memorization while neglecting those aspects such asthe internal structure of idioms, the understanding of their meanings and the role theyplay in second language acquisition. Contrary to the traditional view, cognitivelinguists hold the view that idioms, as the products of our conceptual system, are in factanalyzable and very much alive metaphorically. The compositive words whichcontribute to the whole meaning of the idiom are analyzable both semantically andsyntactically, with conceptual metaphor as its main motivation. A better understandingof the metaphorical nature and conceptual metaphor facilitates the mastery of figurativelanguage and idioms.The paper aims to introduce a new teaching method of idioms based on cognitivetheory, with the purpose of facilitating idiom acquisition by revealing the cognitivemotivation of the specific idiom.The paper firstly introduced the related cognitive theory and reviewed thetraditional research as well as the new achievements of cognitive research. Then thepaper carried out an empirical study of idiom teaching to explore whether giving propercognitive instruction can facilitate the understanding and memorizing process of idiomsand further promoting the acquisition. The research chose two classes of English majorfreshmen of Harbin Normal university as participants in the research. The two classeswere of the same proficiency level and population. According to random selection, oneclass was chosen as the experimental class and the other as the control class.The instrument consisted of two copies of teaching materials, one pretest paper,and two posttest papers. The procedure was as follows: in the first week, pretest was carried out for both classes to ensure there was no apparent difference of idiomproficiency between the two classes; in the second week, teaching material1wasinstructed for class1while teaching material2was instructed for class2. Posttest1wascarried out immediately after the instruction for both classes to see whether cognitiveinstruction can facilitate the short-term memory of idioms; two weeks later, posttest2was carried out for both classes to testify whether cognitive instruction can facilitatelong-term memory of idioms. The data gathered in the experiment were analyzed bySPSS. The results showed that compared with traditional teaching method, the newteaching method based on cognitive theory played an obvious facilitating role in bothshort-term and long-term memory of idioms.Based on the new achievement of cognitive research of idioms and the results ofthe present empirical study, the writer also gave out some suggestions for cognitiveteaching method, which were aimed at providing some hints for those who wereinterested in putting cognitive teaching method into practice.