Cognitive construction grammar and foreign language teaching: a proposal for teaching English dative alternation

Abstract

This article seeks to contribute with the application of theoretical studies of Cognitive Construction Grammar (CCG) – one of the functionalist strands of Construction Grammar – to foreign language teaching. In order to achieve that, the article reports an experiment whose goal was evaluating the possibility of combining the analytical mechanisms of CCG to the theoretical fundamentals that characterize communicative approaches of foreign language teaching. Specifically, the experiment compared the effectiveness of two types of didactic approaches to English dative alternation: on the one hand, a traditional approach (non-dialogic and expository) associated with a constructionist treatment of the grammatical topic; on the other hand, a communicative approach (dialogic and learner-centered), also associated with a treatment based on CCG. The results (i) suggest that the adoption of a cognitivist and constructionist perspective is perfectly feasible with the use of a communicative approach in language teaching and (ii) indicate that this combination can be relevant since it provides improvements in student performance in more spontaneous communicative tasks.