JOURNAL OF LANGUAGE STUDIES

Attitudes of EFL University Students towards the Application of Cognitive Grammar to Teaching Selected Grammar Topics

Abas Mohammed Salih

Department of English, College of Education, University of Garmian

Hoshang Farooq Jawad

Department of English, College of Basic Education, University of Sulaimani

DOI: https://doi.org/10.25130/lang.7.3.6

Keywords: Cognitive Grammar, Cognitive Linguistics, attitude, English as a foreign language EFL

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Abstract

This study is an attempt to investigate the attitude of EFL university students towards the application of Cognitive Grammar (henceforth CG) in the Kurdish context to teaching selected grammar topics, namely English tenses, passivization and modal auxiliary verbs. CG is an approach within the framework of Cognitive Linguistics (henceforth CL) to the meaning of grammatical structures and has two crucial guiding principles: the symbolic commitment and usage-based commitment. The study has used an attitude questionnaire as its data collection tool. Its participants were comprised of (27) EFL university students who had taken part in a 12-week course of Cognitive Grammar treatment focusing on the aforementioned grammatical phenomena. The data was analyzed descriptively through the Statistical Package for Social Sciences SPSS by finding the mean score, standard deviation and percentages of the respondents’ answers to the statements of the questionnaire. It was found that the participants generally had a positive attitude towards the application of CG to teaching the above-mentioned topics. The overall mean score of the questionnaire was (3.7680) which shows the students’ high agreement with the questionnaire’s items. It was also found that the approach had increased the students’ learning motivation and had a positive effect on the affective, behavioural and cognitive aspects of their attitude. The study has ended with some recommendations for further studies before being able to generalize the findings of the current study.

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