Fleshcard: A Metacognitive Method for Second Language Learning and Pedagogy Gamified with Metonymic Eponyms and Narrative Metatexts

Abstract

Addressing the challenge of English language proficiency is a central concern in social and educational policy in Spain. This chapter describes a biocultural transformation of L2/C2 English learning and pedagogy based on advanced Cognitive Linguistics and Poetics, Narratology, Social Psychology, Cognitive Phenomenology, Cognitive Psychology, and Neuroscience principles. An experimental course of Medical English I was implemented during three academic years with the specific community of my first-year college students (Degree of Medicine, Faculty of Health Sciences, University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Spain, 2016–2019). A new methodological praxis coined as Fleshcard Method was designed as a peer game grounded on core interdisciplinary social principles of how human cognition cooperates with the body and the environment. From an evolutionary view of language as biocultural niche construction and with the help of a structured 2-side flashcard as symbolic cognitive artifact, an eponym-based metonymic and metatextual game was designed and lively enacted in class. It was tested in the framework of 4E-cognition (embodied, embedded, enactive, extended), and performed as a newfangled metacognitive, enactive narrative, and cooperative routine. A student-centered pedagogical praxis based on peer learning, simulation, and participatory sense-making was executed, which relied on a 4C (communication, cooperation, control, critical thinking) self-individuating dynamics. The Fleshcard Game, a highly structured class routine of pretending to be a famous (eponymous) doctor, was accomplished by means of literary narrative metafictive procedures and organized as self-reflexive stories, enacted eponym-based narrativity, and a linguistic and pictorial conceptual flashcard, all gamified in an inspired medical performativity. The critical aim of this social method was introducing a new meaning of the Humanities in the Sciences, enhancing the cognitive and cultural education of future international doctors. Working with cognitive metonymic eponyms as self-reflexively projected human lives enacted as metafictive stories, was a patent aid to undertake this highly experimental praxis and thus to enhance pedagogy and language learning.