Conceptual metaphors and emotion expressions in the English for Specific Purposes classroom

Abstract

The bulk of studies dealing with conceptual metaphors in the language classroom describe conceptual metaphor-based pedagogical proposals to teach vocabulary (e.g., Boers, 2000, 2013; Littlemore, 2009; Cortés de los Ríos and Sánchez, 2017). All these are substantial contributions to the field of English language teaching and learning. Despite the growing interest in the field, the effects of conceptual metaphor-based vocabulary instruction on learners still require further attention (Boers, 2013). This paper is an attempt to advance this line of research by exploring the effects of instruction of a pedagogical proposal to teach metaphorical vocabulary belonging to two basic emotions (happiness and sadness). The study is set in a Spanish higher education context, particularly in an English for Specific Purposes subject offered in the Bachelor’s Degree in Psychology. A pre-experimental design consisting of pre-test and post-test measures was adopted to gauge participants’ previous knowledge and progress after instruction. In order to analyse participants’ performance, a paired-sample T-test was used, and effect size was calculated by applying Cohen’s d. Results show statistically significant effects of the pedagogical approach as well as a large size effect, which reveals the efficacy of the instruction. This exploratory study suggests that this area deserves further investigation and its findings set the ground for future research involving experimental designs.

Keywords

• metaphor
• emotion
• ESP
• higher education
• vocabulary
• language learning