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Applying Cognitive Linguistics in the English Language Classroom

Applying Cognitive Linguistics in the English Language Classroom cover

Applying Cognitive Linguistics in the English Language Classroom

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Pre-order. Available 23 Jul 2026
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Description

This book promotes greater interest in cognitive linguistics (CL) among English language teaching (ELT) practitioners, while offering researchers a more direct line toward shaping pedagogy. The book presents a collection of CL-informed ready-to-use pedagogical summaries and activities that teachers without background knowledge in CL can take directly to their classrooms. Importantly, the book targets traditionally challenging areas of English instruction. Part One addresses vocabulary topics such as idioms, collocations, and phrasal verbs. Part Two tackles tricky grammar topics such as prepositions, articles, and modal verbs. Part Three takes on discourse and pragmatics topics such as cohesive devices in writing and making requests and refusals in speaking. Each chapter tackles a different topic of the English language and includes the following sections: 1) introduction of the challenge(s) with the said English language topic, 2) explanation of the CL approach and how it can mitigate the observed challenge(s), 3) practically-oriented description of the CL-inspired teaching activities, positioned within a specific pedagogical context but easily transferable to other contexts. All chapters include insights that are highly practical and easily implemented in different contexts of ELT. The ultimate goal of the volume is to motivate teachers to try new pedagogical tools and to influence English language pedagogy through the research-documented powers of applied cognitive linguistics.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Delivering on the Promise of Cognitive Linguistics, Benjamin White (St. Michael's College, USA) and Natalia Dolgova (George Washington University, USA)
Part I: Vocabulary Topics
1. A Cognitive Linguistic Approach to Teaching Idioms: Helping Second Language Learners Make Sense of Figurative Expressions, Frank Boers (University of Western Ontario, Canada) and Ana M. Piquer-Píriz (University of Extremadura, Spain)
2. Teaching Synonyms by Exploring the Roles of Salience and Construal, Dilin Liu (University of Alabama, USA) and Yaochen Deng (Dalian University of Foreign Languages, China)
3. Teaching English Collocations by Exploring Their Usage Patterns and Underlying Motivations, Dilin Liu (University of Alabama, USA) and Jie Qin (South China Agricultural University, China)
4. Bring It Up: Illustrating Phrasal Verbs for Young Beginners, Serena Gammon (independent scholar)
5. A Cognitive Linguistic Approach to Teaching L2 Learners the Noncentral Senses of English Prepositions, Charles Mueller (Fuji Women's University, Japan)
6. Embodied Pedagogy: Teaching English Number Marking to Speakers of Classifier Languages, David Wijaya (University of Sydney, Australia)
7. A Better Way to Teach English Articles: Framing Nouns, Benjamin White (St. Michael's College, USA)
8. Concept-Based Language Instruction of English Modal Verbs: A Cognitive Linguistics Inspired Approach, Helen Zhao (University of Melbourne, Australia)
9. Introducing the Present Perfect through a Cognitive Linguistics Frame, Susanne Niemeier (University of Koblenz, Germany)
10. Using Cognitive Linguistic Tools for Teaching English Cohesive Devices of Contrast, Natalia Dolgova (George Washington University, USA)
11. Temporal Cohesion and the Teaching of the English Tense-Aspect System: An Applied Cognitive Linguistics Approach, Paolo Infante (Minnesota State University, USA)
12. If-Conditionals Made Easy: A Cognitive Approach with the Head-and-Shoulders Diagram, Ivy Wong (University of York, UK)
13. Teaching Modals of Obligation and Necessity to Support English Learner Pragmatic Development, Paolo Infante and Thomas Maldonado (Minnesota State University, USA)
References
Index

Product details

Bloomsbury Academic Test
Published 23 Jul 2026
Format Hardback
Edition 1st
Extent 320
ISBN 9781350498730
Imprint Bloomsbury Academic
Illustrations 20 bw illus
Dimensions 234 x 156 mm
Series Bloomsbury Guidebooks for Language Teachers
Publisher Bloomsbury Publishing

About the contributors

Anthology Editor

Benjamin White

Benjamin White is MATESOL Director and Peace Corps…

Anthology Editor

Natalia Dolgova

Natalia Dolgova is Teaching Associate Professor of…

Environment: Staging