COGNITIVE-ORIENTED TEACHING OF THE MOTHER TONGUE

The paper aims to reveal the pedagogical potential of cognitive-oriented teaching of the mother tongue. We started out from the theoretical premises provided by cognitive linguistics, both its American branch, emphasizing the body anchoring of meaning, and from the Polish orientation, concentrated on the theory of linguistic picture of the world and semantic profiling. The theories mentioned were modified in accord with the educational goals of mother tongue teaching and applied namely to the sphere of lexicology. Conducting our research, we used both empiric methods - questionnaire - and interpretative methods. The analyzed population was formed by six groups of children from elementary school and grammar school of the age of 11-14 years. By using a questionnaire we found which connotations were aroused in the children by words naming selected parts of the human body and in which somatic idioms these words were used. We categorize all the data from the semantic point of view, which allowed us to reveal the children's conceptualization of selected parts of the body. Disregarding how the responses in individual groups of children varied in their forms of language expression, they were consistent in terms of semantic categories. It was also shown that given semantic categories were related to imaginative schemas based on the body anchoring of meaning and that they corresponded to semantic profiles. Based on the introduced theory and interpretation of empiric data, we propose potential didactic applications of our research. We introduce ways in which pedagogues can diagnose the conceptualization processes of children and refine the children's conceptualizations. We emphasize the importance of reading and interpretation of texts of different styles and genres as well as work with various types of language dictionaries. Such activities should result in enlarging the linguistic and communicative competence of children. Our paper aims to contribute to the development of cognitive-oriented didactics of the mother tongue, in our case Czech.