Brian Birdsell

Hirosaki University

Embodied cognition argues that the body plays a crucial role in cognitive processes including perception, problem-solving, and language. As a result, research in the learning sciences has recently begun to explore the implications of embodied cognition in learning, resulting in an emerging field called embodied learning. In this paper, I first revi...

Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) has become an important teaching approach for foreign language education. This is a dual-focus approach to learning where students learn academic content through a foreign language. The aim of this paper is to provide information for other teachers and institutions that are considering implementing a...

Phrasal verbs (PVs) have long troubled learners of English. The difficulty of learning them is multifaceted, involving the sheer number of them, their polysemous nature, and how many have a metaphorical sense. Consequently, a large body of research has looked for more effective ways to teach PVs. These studies commonly compare the effect different...

It is well documented that exercise plays a critical role in maintaining physical health. More recently, a growing body of research has begun to focus on the mental benefits of exercise ranging from reducing depression to enhancing various cognitive abilities like memory and attention. These abilities are paramount for learning to occur, and thus,...

Technological changes have the power to disrupt standard educational practices. One recent advancement is neural machine translation (NMT) systems such as Google Translate and DeepL which due to their widespread use have already impacted foreign language education. To explore the effect of NMTs on student essay writing and teachers' evaluation of i...

Visual metaphors deliberately deviate from the literal representation of an object. The resulting incongruity has the potential to be more engaging and memorable for the viewer and thus are frequently used as a design feature in advertisements. Recently, researchers have begun to more thoroughly examine the advantages that visual metaphors play in...

Phrasal verbs (PVs) are notoriously difficult for language learners since they are numerous in number, highly polysemous, as well as metaphorical, and the meaning is often opaque. Over the past two decades, researchers have shown the benefits of using a cognitive linguistic approach to teaching them. Expanding this line of research, a quasi-experim...

Universities in Japan and across the globe had to quickly adapt to the COVID-19 pandemic, resulting in the emergence of remote learning classrooms. In this paper, I discuss a remote learning CLIL course that integrates all four academic skills with the aim of developing learners’ international communicative competence in English through discussing,...

CLIL refers to content and language integrated learning and has become a popular method for teaching English for it makes the learning more meaningful and has been shown to increase student motivation. In this presentation, we first review the theoretical and pedagogical background of CLIL. Then, we discuss one national university in northern Japan...

Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) came quickly upon the scene of language education in the 1990s and was embraced enthusiastically by teachers and institutions. Empirical findings of the benefits of CLIL began to be published (i.e., Jiménez Catalán & Ruiz de Zarobe, 2009; Lorenzo, Casal, & Moore, 2010), which further provided appeal a...

The present article provides an overview of embodied cognition, which theorizes that conceptual knowledge is grounded in sensorimotor, emotional, and bodily states, and how it can be applied to an embodied learning approach to foreign language instruction. Specifically, I consider this from three different perspectives: the use of gestures, especia...

Creativity is a multifaceted and complex human trait that allows one to generate and explore unlimited novel ideas and artifacts. One method to study creativity is to use a creative cognition approach (Finke, Ward, & Smith, 1992; Smith, Ward, Finke, 1995; Ward, Smith, & Finke, 1999), which examines the cognitive processes and structures that lead t...

Two key features of Conceptual Metaphor Theory are that metaphors appear in multiple modes of communication from language to gestures to pictures and that metaphors scaffold our understanding of abstract concepts by grounding them in embodied, physically experienced concepts. In an exploratory study, we investigated metaphor production and interpre...

A CLIL approach views learning as a constructive process that seeks to engage learners with content while actively developing their communication skills in the target language. One goal of this approach is to cognitively challenge learners and develop their creative potential. Creativity is an essential part in foreign language learning since natur...

This paper reviews Mark Landau's book, Conceptual Metaphor in Social Psychology: The Poetics of Everyday Life. This book provides an interdisciplinary look at metaphor by applying theories from Cognitive Linguistics to research in Social Psychology. The main argument of this book is that metaphor is a key cognitive tool for humans, which allows the...

The objective of this study was to develop and test a self-report questionnaire that looked at the satisfaction and frustration of the four basic psychological needs as outlined in self-determination theory (i.e., autonomy, competence, relatedness, and novelty) within an English as a foreign language-learning context. This study then explored the r...

The study of metaphor is an interdisciplinary endeavor crossing such fields as cognitive linguistics, psychology, and creativity studies. Two important conclusions on the nature of metaphor have been drawn to date: (1) the ability to use metaphor is a normal human cognitive ability and widespread in language; (2) metaphor is not a unitary construct...

This study examined one dimension of metaphoric competence, specifically creative metaphor production, and analyzed this ability in both a first and second language. Viewing metaphoric competence as a multifaceted construct that lies on a continuum from the highly conventional to the highly creative is widely recognized in the field of cognitive li...

Although much is known about the importance of using visual aids in the foreign language classroom, awareness of what relationship these images have with the text and how they provide teaching opportunities for the lesson is severely limited n this article, rst review research that assesses how images are used in language learning textbooks esearch...

Japanese university students’ interest in taking a Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) course conducted in English was assessed. In addition, a questionnaire was utilized to measure intrinsic motivation, international outlook, and anxiety. An independent sample t-test in SPSS was performed in order to look at how these individual differ...

Self-Access Learning Centers (SALCs) have become common at many universities in Japan. They provide a learning space to actively interact with a foreign language. These centres are self-access and thus promote autonomous learning, so one of the challenges they have to overcome is the difficulty of attracting students to voluntarily enter and partic...

The Bloomsbury Companion to Cognitive Linguistics is a comprehensive and accessible reference resource to research in contemporary cognitive linguistics. Written by leading figures in the field, the volume provides readers with an authoritative overview of methods and current research topics and future directions. The volume covers all the most imp...

This paper investigates results from a motivational questionnaire that looks at international posture (Yashima, 2002, 2009) and anxiety among 231 first year university students in Japan studying English as a foreign language. Using SPSS, a t-test was run to compare the results between male and female students. Gender differences correlated signific...

Creativity is far from a straightforward construct within the field of psychology, and this paper attempts to uncover some of the complexity and uncertainty around it. The paper first provides a brief overview of creativity, it's importance in society, various stereotypes and contradictory assumptions attached to it, and the search for a working de...