(Amphithéâtre)
McCafferty, Steven G.
University of Nevada, Las Vegas
Gesture, Metaphor and Internalization : Material
foundations for Second Language Acquisition
In the course of conceptualizing her ideas concerning what constitutes
an “ideal marriage” a second language speaker of English, a
long-time immigrant to the U.S., materializes her thoughts through
a verbal conceptual metaphor (IDEAL MARRIAGE IS A MANUFACTURED
PRODUCT) in conjunction with the use of metaphoric gestures. However,
her ideas are much better represented through gesture than
speech due to diffi culties with production in the L2. I argue that
with metaphoric gesture, she is utilizing her experience of actions
in the everyday world in an attempt to gain control over thinking
and speaking in the L2. This argument is based, theoretically, on the
Vygotskian construct of internalization, following the approach to
this process taken by Piotor Gal’perin, who argued that internalization
begins with embodied experience on the material plane, that
object-related activity in the world forms the basis for the creation
of an internal, intrapersonal plane, and that this has much
to do with learning. I argue that by extending this perspective to
include perceptual actions in the form of gesture it is possible to
afford structure for L2 learners in their meaning-making efforts. This
perspective on gesture and language learning suggests potentially
important implications for L2 pedagogy as well. A second aspect of
the study focuses on the possibility of cognitive change with exposure
to a new language and culture through the acquisition of different
conceptual metaphors than those found in the L1.
