Applied Cognitive Linguistics in an Intercultural World
By: Rodolfo Mattiello
Whenever you are teaching a language, if Mikhail Bakhtine (1977) was as present throughout your undergraduate days as he was in mine, students’ background will certainly be acknowledged in the classroom. In case he was not, his work Le Marxism et la Philosophie du Langage focuses on the creation of signs as a result of individual experiences and social interactions, deliberately put together thus making meaning. “Individual consciousness is a social-ideological fact” (Bakhtine, 1977, p. 30) and it works as the premise of this article that teaching should not be top-down with teachers solely responsible for bringing knowledge into the lessons, discarding the students’ backgrounds. Instead, educators should embrace a bottom-up approach where students bring their experiences to the classroom and then teachers link them to the content. Their cultural background is brought into spoken discourse whenever the students engage in a conversation since “we use language to make sense of the world” and “we use it to convey pretty much any meaning that we want” (Berger, 2012, p. 11).
The foreign language teaching scenario in Brazil automatically mixes two very rich (linguistic) cultures: the economically privileged and the economically unprivileged. Because it is a multicultural country, with socioeconomic diversity, a single group of sixth graders, in a private school for example, may have kids whose parents work at the school and are part of the working class while also having kids that come from an economically privileged family. Therefore, even though two kids may live in the same neighborhood in houses next to each other, because of their different experiences, they will have different meanings for their world. In a vastly diverse group these differences in perspective will certainly be apparent. The embodied experience brought by the learners can be so distinct from one another that their conceptualizations of even simple things, represented by their speech–language (Berger, 2012), may be antagonistic. For example, the following sentence can have different mental representations:
Eu não tomo meu café da manhã em casa. (I don’t have my breakfast at home.)
From the perspective of a student that comes from a financially privileged family, it can represent an economic situation that affords breakfast at a diner, parents together, a moment with the entire family. On the other hand, a learner whose family is underprivileged may produce this sentence to express a lack of money to buy food and an urge to arrive at school to finally grab something to eat. Whenever we are involved in a spoken conversation, our mind retrieves mental representations that we developed through our personal experiences (conceptualizations) in order to either express ourselves or to understand what is being spoken. Such retrieval needs to be activated in the classroom, but if teachers are not ready to recognize and embrace the students’ knowledge and use it to connect them to the new linguistic repertoire, their job will be much more difficult.
You may ask now, “what does mental representation have to do with language teaching?”. Everything. Well, at least under the lens of Applied Cognitive Linguistics. Knowledge is transferable, in other words, a person who understands the concept of counting, will transfer this conceptualization whenever they learn a new language (Conteh, 2015). For instance, the mathematical concept of sequential numbers, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 is translated into words no matter what the native language. Thus, a Brazilian student of English that lives in Brazil already has this mental representation of mathematical sequence stored and also knows exactly which linguistic chunk is necessary to describe their emotion or a situation. The student’s English teacher only needs to access this concept and label it with the new language. Just like counting–a person doesn’t unlearn how to do it when in the process of learning a new language–a student won’t delete their existing knowledge, their conceptualizations, they will just augment them.
The million dollar question then is: when we teach languages, how do we do it effectively? What do my students learn? We need to start by getting rid of normative teaching, for example, explaining and describing grammar rules. Llopis-Garcia (2024) conducted a survey for teachers of Spanish as a foreign language and found out that a little over 20% of the 38 respondents claimed that teaching grammar rules is essential for language learning/teaching. Still, yes the advice is to not teach rules. Let’s picture the following. You have just bought a piece of furniture at IKEA, and when the carrier delivers the product to your place, inside the box instead of wooden boards, screws and nails, there is only a printed manual. You have no interaction whatsoever with the product except for the manual where you can find guidelines on how to assemble the furniture. You may become an expert in the rules for furniture assembly, but what about the pressure in screwing the board to its support? Can you make sure that the piece will be steady while you nail the side boards? These are not in the guidelines, but they are just as important and you have the answers by interacting with the furniture. The same applies to languages.
Let’s look back at that sentence in Portuguese and split it in half. Focusing on the second half ‘at home’, this is a construction that some Brazilian learners struggle with because of the preposition and the word ‘home’ is often confused with and replaced by ‘house’. The confusion is justified since the equivalent in Portuguese is ‘em casa’ and here we find the first stop for the bus to Cognitiveland. Because of decades with teachers focusing on the teaching of isolated words and on grammar rules, many Brazilian students of English know that ‘house’ means ‘casa’ but the connection to a preposition is unclear. The separation results in prepositions being taught as an island and nouns as a different island, without connection between them. Consequently, some Brazilian learners of English combine the words and produce ‘in home’, ‘in house’, ‘at house’, ‘on house’ even and, also ‘at home’. If teachers aimed at retrieving the students’ concept for ‘at home’, they would mentally travel to the moment that meaning was created, recover the linguistic model in their native language and then the teacher’s job would be to introduce ‘at home’ to overlap with ‘em casa’.
Time to turn our attention to the first half of that sentence, the part that goes ‘I don’t have my breakfast’ (‘eu não tomo meu café da manhã’). The tense usually represents routines, so instead of focusing on the rules of how to construct the sentence–concentrating on technical terms like subject, object, valences, and syntax–have the students activate their previous knowledge, bringing up their experiences. They will wind up reaching out to the construction in Portuguese and, once again, all we need to do is present the equivalent in English and proceed to practicing. There are some ways to activate the learners’ mental representations to link with the linguistic model. Here are some classroom practices (Llopis-Garcia, 2024, p.12).
- Do you try to bring “some kind of comprehensive logic” into the formal and descriptive explanations that your textbook provides?
- Do you explain grammatical concepts and illustrate lexical items by way of gesturing, moving around the classroom, and using all objects within reach to represent meaning?
- Does your board fill up with stick figures, arrows, and shapes when explaining prepositions?
- Do you ask your students “how do you say this in your L1?” and then try to bridge the gap between their language and the L2 by finding common ground?
These are some examples to use with your students that will respect and acknowledge their background because it includes concepts formed through their own experiences and associated with linguistic constructions. In a multicultural world, and many times in a multicultural classroom, it is fundamental that we language teachers embrace and use the students’ experiences because they are essential for linguistic retrieval of constructions so that we can offer the equivalent in the target language.
References
Bakhtine, M. (1977). Le marxisme et la philosophie du langage: Essai d’application de la méthode sociologique en linguistique. Minuit.
Bergen, B. K. (2012). Louder than words: The new science of how the mind makes meaning. Basic Books.
Conteh, J. (2015). The EAL teaching book: Promoting success for multilingual learners (2nd ed.). Sage.
Llopis-García, R. (2024). Applied cognitive linguistics and L2 instruction. Cambridge University Press.
Rodolfo Mattiello, MSc., is an English teacher, a guest lecturer for Language Acquisition at Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Paraná. He’s the founder of Mattiello Consultoria, BELíngue, a book author and co-hosts the Chá Pedagógico podcast.