Cognitive Linguistic Approaches to Teaching Vocabulary and Phraseology: 6 (Applications of Cognitive Linguistics [ACL], 6)

Mastering the vocabulary of a foreign language is one of the most daunting tasks that language learners face.The immensity of the task is underscored by the realisation that it is not only single words but also numerous standardised phrases (idioms, collocations, etc.) that need to be acquired.There is thus a clear need for instructional methods that help learners tackle this task, and yet few proposals for vocabulary instruction have so far gone beyond techniques for rote-learning and familiar means of promoting of noticing.The reason for this is that vocabulary and phraseology have long been assumed arbitrary. The volume offers a long-overdue alternative by exploring and exploiting the presence of linguistic 'motivation' - or, systematic non-arbitrariness - in the lexicon.The first half of the volume reports ample empirical evidence of the pedagogical effectiveness of presenting vocabulary to learners as non-arbitrary.The data reported indicate that the proposed instructional methods