Pictures Meet Words: Learners of English Describing Motion Situations

Abstract

This paper analyses the choices of English learners describing the opening scene of Mayer’s (1969) Frog, where are you? which depicts a frog escaping from a jar. A number of results were later tested using drawings that portray a person climbing. Speaking multiple languages might allow adjustment to ways of thinking, when formulating utterances and pointing to different details when describing pictures (Thinking for Speaking Hypothesis, Slobin 1996). The present paper contends that fewer contexts evoke mental images of climbing for speakers of Italian and Ladin who are learning English than for German-speaking English-learners, due to different cross-linguistic influences.

Keywords

• images in linguistics
• picture interpretation and description in further language learning
• motion situations
• Mayer’s (1969) Frog, where are you?