Staging the introduction of figurative extensions of familiar vocabulary items in efl: Some preliminary considerations

Resumo

In natural contexts, children are exposed to the many senses of highly polysemous words from early ages. Lacking this rich, natural exposure to target language forms, EFL learners’ grasp of this aspect of language use will largely depend on the range of senses which they meet in the graded input of the classroom. Thus, which different semantic extensions should be introduced and at what stage of the learning process are important issues for syllabus design. This paper discusses these issues in relation to body part terms, many of which display considerable referential flexibility, extending their meanings through different figurative mappings. Research carried out with young EFL learners to explore their understanding of and reasoning about four senses of head, for example,  eveals that children use different reasoning strategies between the ages of 5 and 11 as their conceptual knowledge develops and becomes more complex. These different strategies gave rise to correct and incorrect comprehension of figurative meanings by both younger and older learners, depending on the various motivations for the meaning extensions. We discuss these findings in relation to the staging of these different senses in ELT.