Mastering the Language of Emotions Through Metaphor: A Socio-Affective and Socio-Cognitive Approach to Building Writing Skills at the University Level

The author demonstrates how to develop and improve the writing competence of French language students at an advanced level (B2), drawing on selected examples of the language of emotions and the concepts of SILENCE and SOLITUDE. The article successfully applies Conceptual Metaphor Theory, initiated by Lakoff and Johnson (1980), to teaching and learning the French vocabulary of emotions as usually being not predictable but metaphorically motivated. A short experiment has been carried out in a group of French-philology undergraduate students. The experiment has been designed to examine the effectiveness of the socio-affective and cognitive approach aimed at developing not only lexical competence, writing skills, and creativity, but also the affective relations among students themselves and between the teacher and students while under lockdown during the COVID-19 pandemic accompanied by online teaching. The experiment shows that being aware of metaphorical motivations behind idiomatic expressions of emotions allows students not only to better learn, use, and organise new vocabulary, but also to be more creative. The author proposes some writing exercises to be used in classroom instruction. Despite the undeniable advantages of the proposed approach, its pedagogical potential should be tested on more data and on a longer-term basis.