Dinámicas sociocognitivas en la enseñanza y el aprendizaje del inglés: la metáfora conceptual como herramienta de análisis del discurso docente

Abstract

The present study it’s included in the international research field related to teacher’s thought and thinking that started way back in the eighties, but found its first important movement at the National Institute of Education Conference in 1960 (Perafán, 2005). Teacher’s thinking research has been founded on three mayor premises: First, that teachers are reflexive beings that make daily pedagogical decisions due to their conceptual baggage. Second, that their classroom’s actions are pre-determined/mediated by those conceptions, and third that we can access such conceptual baggage through two possible routes. The easy or explicit one, and the difficult or implicit one. There has been done a lot in those two routes, but we have found that in the implicit’ theories one there are quite a few research gaps due to an inadequate understanding of language and mind. There is a mayor need to unify criteria in the field toward an appropriate definition of teacher’ thinking (Jiménez & Feliciano, 2006). We strongly believe that the Cognitive Sciences framework can provide valuable evidence to construct a much adequate unified definition to teacher’s thinking nature. To do so, we have the research tools provided by the Second-Generation Cognitive Linguistics disciplines keeping in mind their two basic compromises. First, that every language that there is, has got the same basic cognitive mechanisms of meaning construction that are interconnected with the rest of mental cognitive processes, and second, that every new finding needs to take into account what has been done in the other theoretical enterprises, especially those in Cognitive Sciences such as psychology, anthropology, neuroscience and artificial intelligence. According to Cognitive Linguistics the mind is inherently embodied, human thought is mostly unconscious and abstract concepts are largely metaphorical (Lakoff & Johnson, 1999). So we can bring those premises to the teachers’ thinking research as is our intention. In our study we have briefly introduced the national educational situation toward L2 teaching, and reflected upon it, to find out that after eight educational law reforms since 1970 the students’ English proficiency has scarcely improved. There must be something we are missing. Our hypothesis proposes that the difficulty of the system, among other complexity aspects, is possibly of conceptual nature. The present paper reflects on the implicit theories of five in-service English teachers, from every representative level of the educative system university, high school, primary and elementary, through the metaphors they use. We analyzed expressions adopted by professors in a real teaching session and interview, using the methodological and theoretical framework of the conceptual metaphor developed by Lakoff & Johnson (1980). Throughout the metaphors study we depicted the scenarios that structured their discourses, and found at the macro structural level two distinguished positions in the conceptualization of TEACHING and LEARNING. On the one hand an atomistic and mechanistic vision, or reductionist approach, due to the underground work of the conduit metaphor realm, and on the other, an organicist vision with structuring metaphors such as TEACHING IS LIFE, POWER, and TAKING OUT FROM PUPILS