Introduction
Second language acquisition (SLA) or second/foreign language teaching has been influenced to various degrees by key linguistic theories, including structural linguistics (Bloomfield, Reference Bloomfield1933; Saussure, Reference Saussure, Bally and Sechehaye1959), generative linguistics (Chomsky, Reference Chomsky1957, Reference Chomsky1965), systemic functional linguistics (Halliday, Reference Halliday1973), and, more recently, contemporary Cognitive Linguistics (CL; Goldberg, Reference Goldberg1995; Lakoff, Reference Lakoff1987, Reference Lakoff and Ortony1993; Langacker, Reference Langacker1987, Reference Langacker1991; Talmy, Reference Talmy1988, Reference Talmy2000), a theory composed of several related linguistic approaches often viewed as a response or complement to generative linguistics. While structural linguistics, generative linguistics, and systemic functional linguistics have each provided a theoretical impetus for one or more of the prominent language teaching methods or approaches over the past century (such as the Audiolingual method, the Natural method, and the Communicative Language Teaching method), CL, as a newcomer, has begun to exert a growing influence since the early 1990s. Given that the purpose of this research timeline article is to present a historical overview of the key thoughts and studies on CL-inspired approaches to instructed second language acquisition (ISLA),Footnote 1 a brief discussion of CL's main differences from the other linguistic theories and its key theoretical tenets is in order.
Being developed out of or in response to generative linguistics, CL also focuses on the role of human mind in language acquisition/use, but it differs significantly from the former and other linguistic theories in several important ways. First and most importantly, CL is so called because it treats language and its use as an integral part of our cognition (rather than as distinct components of the human mind) and thus, the nature of language reflects general cognitive mechanisms (including attention, categorization, association, and analogy), as well as the ways we human beings interact with our environment (Ellis, Reference Ellis2006, Reference Ellis2016). Second, unlike generative linguistics and structural linguistics, which focus on form, CL deems meaning central in the study of language, viewing all language items as constructions/symbolic units, that is, pairings of form and meaning regardless of their size. Third, whereas generative linguistics views language knowledge as largely innate, CL considers language knowledge usage-based and motivated because language use and meaning are shaped by our embodied conceptualizations through the workings of the human mind, a point that we will elaborate on below. Fourth, CL also differs from systemic functional linguistics, despite their similar focus on meaning (and function in the case of the latter), in that the latter overlooks or pays less attention to the mediating role of the human mind in language use, that is, the role of the human mind in creating categories and interpreting experiences in language use (Holme, 2009Footnote *; Siewierska, Reference Siewierska and Allen2013).
Regarding the theoretical tenets of CL, it is necessary to first emphasize that CL is not a mixed bag of approaches but, rather, a coherent linguistic theory composed of several interrelated approaches to the study of language, including cognitive grammar (which approaches knowledge of grammar/language as symbolic units, and in terms of general cognitive processes; Langacker, Reference Langacker1987, Reference Langacker1991), construction grammar (which postulates that constructions constitute the basic components of human language; Goldberg, Reference Goldberg1995), cognitive semantics (which posits that language meaning is conceptual, that is, the meaning of a linguistic item is a concept in the mind based on experiences with the entity or relationship that the item refers to, rather than being a reference to the entity in the physical world; Talmy, Reference Talmy1988, Reference Talmy2000), and conceptual metaphor theory (which holds that metaphor, rather than being merely a figure of speech or a matter of language, is a fundamental mode of thought that provides cross-domain mappings in the conceptual system for understanding the world; Lakoff, Reference Lakoff1987, Reference Lakoff and Ortony1993). As such, CL posits a few new theories about language and language acquisition, which have been inspiring and informing new approaches to second/foreign language instruction. First, as noted earlier, CL avers that meaning is fundamental to language and inherent in every aspect of language study from morpheme to lexis to syntax, with syntactic patterns also carrying meanings (albeit of a schematic/abstract nature, such as the Cause-to-Receive construction shown in Tom cooked Mary a dinner). Meaning, which is equated with conceptualization, can be understood as a concept or mental image formed in the mind based on a person's interactive experience with the physical-spatial world. Second, with meaning being central, language is composed of constructions/symbolic units, including filled, partially-filled, and highly schematic unfilled constructions (Holme, 2009*; Langacker, Reference Langacker1991). This CL view of the structure of language collapses the established rigid separation between lexis and grammar held firmly in traditional theories such as generative linguistics and structural linguistics (Liu & Tsai, Reference Liu, Tsai, Wen and Taylor2021). Third, rather than being arbitrary, language structures and usages are generally motivated by our everyday experience based largely on our embodied conceptualizations. This language nature highlights the importance of exploring the motivations of language usages in language learning including the various cases of iconicity, for example, the use of repetitions for emphasis across languages (as shown in Jean is a very, very good teacher) motivated by the quantity principle of iconicity: more/stronger meaning = more linguistic form. Furthermore, the conceptual nature of language makes CL-inspired language instruction (CL-ILI) not only more engaging, but also more effective than teaching language as an arbitrary system (Langacker, 2008*; Taylor, 1993*). Last, CL considers language acquisition usage-based and emerging out of situated instances of communication (e.g., Goldberg, Reference Goldberg1995; Langacker, Reference Langacker1991, 2008*; Taylor, Reference Taylor2002). Thus, adequate language input and repeated use of language constructions in meaningful contexts are vital for acquiring a language, highlighting the importance of frequency distribution in language acquisition (Ellis, Reference Ellis2002, Reference Ellis2006, Reference Ellis2016). These key tenets that CL offers, as Taylor (1993*) noted about 30 years ago, should have significant implications for ISLA, which, as a theoretically and empirically based area of inquiry, aims to understand how systematic manipulations of language learning mechanisms and/or learning conditions may promote the learning and development of a target language (Gass et al., Reference Gass, Behney and Plonsky2020; Loewen, Reference Loewen2015). Developing out of CL and ISLA, the study of CL-ILI has emerged as a new and significant stream of inquiry in applied linguistics (e.g., Achard & Niemeier, 2004*; Boers & Lindstromberg, 2008*; Littlemore, 2009*; Tyler, 2012*).
It should also be noted that there have been attempts to integrate a few other meaning-based teaching approaches/practices into CL-ILI so as to provide a more comprehensive, coherent account of how the learning of language constructions may be enhanced. A prominent one of these approaches/practices is concept-based language instruction (C-BLI, also referred as concept-based instruction or CBI), a systematic approach to language instruction grounded in the main principles of the sociocultural theory (Lantolf & Tsai, 2018*; Lantolf et al., Reference Lantolf, Xi and Minakova2021). While CL-ILI offers explicit instruction of the motivated meanings of a language construction, C-BLI provides a stepwise teaching procedure with well-designed, meaning-based activities where the construction is repeatedly used in meaningful contexts. Together with C-BLI, the effects of CL-based instruction may be optimized. Other teaching approaches/practices that have been integrated into CL-ILI include Processing Instruction (Colasacco, 2019*; Llopis-García, 2006*) and task-based/supported language learning (Jacobsen, 2018*).
Drawing on theoretical developments in the area of CL (e.g., cognitive grammar, cognitive semantics, and metaphor theory), application of CL concepts to second language (L2) teaching and learning has begun to attract increasing attention over the past three decades, as evidenced by a growing number of publications concerning CL-ILI including articles, monographs, edited volumes, and special journal issues. These publications can be broadly grouped into three categories. The first consists of conceptual/theoretical pieces of work on implications/insights of CL for language teaching. In this category, a systematic, coherent CL-based analysis of the meanings of target constructions is often followed by an illustration of how such an analysis may be applied in the L2 classroom. Most of the works in this category appeared between the early 1990s and the early 2000s, when not much was known of how constructions could be effectively taught and how the seemingly complicated CL concepts might be understood by L2 learners.
The second category includes empirical studies that investigated the effectiveness of CL-ILI, often in comparison with either non-CL methods or other variants of CL-inspired methods, on learners' acquisition of target L2 constructions. The research in this category began with Kövecses and Szabó's study in 1996 and Boers's in 2000 and it has since become the dominant category. Within this category, while most studies compared the effectiveness of CL-ILI with traditional, form-focused teaching approaches such as the grammar-translation method (e.g., Jacobsen, 2018*; Yasuda, 2010*), a few recent ones endeavored to demonstrate how CL approaches could be optimized by comparing the benefits of two or more variants of CL-inspired instructional practices (e.g., Kim & Rah, 2021*; Suñer et al., 2023*). Although the latter studies are very small in number, they may signify that this field is perhaps moving on from the question ‘Does CL work?’ to ‘What CL applications/implementations work particularly well?’ In general, these studies afforded convincing evidence for the facilitative effects of explicit instruction inspired by CL on learners’ acquisition of L2 constructions at the lexis, phrase, and clause levels. They have contributed immensely to the field, not only by providing positive evidence for the effects of CL-ILI, but also by elucidating how the sophisticated CL concepts may be made available to and understood by L2 learners and how the learning of target constructions may be best assessed.
The last category is composed of empirical studies which, rather than examining instructional effects of CL-inspired approaches similar to those in Category 2, conducted CL theory-guided investigations of first language (L1) and/or L2 data regarding various challenging SLA-related issues and their results provided specific suggestions for CL-ILI. The studies of this category began to appear in the early 2010s. Yet, this category of studies is smaller in number compared with the second category, but still contributes, albeit less directly, to the inquiry of CL-ILI. It does so by investigating some long-standing SLA-related issues (e.g., the nature of collocations in Liu, 2010* and the cognitive mechanisms behind synonym choices in Liu & Zhong, 2016*) and their pedagogical implications in a new light through a cognitive analysis of the use of language constructions in corpus and/or elicited language data. A main reason for the emergence of this line of research is that, as noted earlier, CL is a family of relatively new developing linguistic theories and since the early 2000s, many applied linguists have been studying and testing these new theories against language data and simultaneously exploring the implications of their findings for language learning/teaching before having time to apply them in the classroom. As such, this type of research plays an important bridging role in the process of finding and applying useful CL theories to language pedagogy, a role that may often been called for when new theories are still developing and their practical applications are only in the early embryo stage. The studies in this category generally indicated the potential facilitative role of CL-based analysis in helping learners better understand the meanings and usages of target constructions.
Against the backdrop of this rapidly growing line of research, we aspire to present a timeline piece that surveys, summarizes, and appraises the existing research on CL-ILI over the past three decades. To ensure a comprehensive coverage of all relevant works in our timeline piece, we decided to include publications of all major thematic types (i.e., theoretical, conceptual, and empirical studies) and also all major genre types (i.e., monographs, book chapters, and journal articlesFootnote 2). To further ensure the importance and quality of the selected items, we adopt the following citation-based selection criteria (except for recently published items, which generally cannot be expected to have many citations): each item must have either received a high number of citations and/or been authored by an influential researcher or researchers in the field, as determined by their total number of CL-ILI related publications and citations. It is our hope that a comprehensive synthesis of the development of research on CL-ILI can help readers not only aggregate research results, but also better understand the key issues at the intersection of CL and language teaching/learning. To assist readers in tracking the course of development in the timeline, the studies are coded according to the following themes:
Research type
Theoretical framework
Target language
Funding
This work was partially supported by the Major Research Grant of Shanghai International Studies University (Grant number: 23ZD011) and the Social Science Grant of Guangdong Province, China (Grant number: GD22CWY04).
Jie Qin is Assistant Professor of Applied Linguistics at South China Agricultural University, China. Her main research interests are task-based and cognitive linguistics-inspired approaches to instructed second language acquisition. She has published articles in journals such as Language Teaching, Language Teaching Research, International Review of Applied Linguistics in Language Teaching (IRAL), and System.
Dilin Liu is Professor Emeritus in the English Department at the University of Alabama, USA. His research focuses on corpus-based description and teaching of English lexis and grammar. He has published extensively including numerous articles in journals such as Applied Linguistics, Cognitive Linguistics, International Journal of Corpus Linguistics, Journal of English for Academic Purposes, Language Teaching Research, Modern Language Journal, Second Language Research, Studies in Second Language Acquisition, and TESOL Quarterly, as well as six books.
Lei Lei is Professor of Applied Linguistics at Shanghai International Studies University, China. His research interests include second language acquisition and academic English. He has published extensively, and his articles have appeared in journals such as Language Teaching, Applied Linguistics, Journal of English for Academic Purposes, Lingua, and System.
