The purpose of the present monograph is to offer teachers and learners of English a comprehensive pedagogical guide to modal verbs. As such, the book presents a fresh introduction to the use of the cognitive approach in the context of pedagogical grammar. The reader will find a short introduction to the cognitive conceptualization of language. The tasks in the book amalgamate three main rationales discussed in Torres-Martínez (2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2020): Task-Based Language Teaching (TBLT), Paper-based Data-Driven Learning (PbDDL) and the cognitive dimension of language providing the systematicity required for the introduction of the tasks in the classroom. I believe readers will find that this book seamlessly connects Construction Grammar theory and English pedagogy in a way that contributes to the important conversation between theory, research and classroom practice.

The focus on communication in TBLT often comes at the expense of form. In this book, the task-based approach is enhanced and coupled with insights into (cognitive) grammar, an approach which sees grammar as meaningful. The book shows how grammar teaching can be integrated into a communicative lesson in a non-explicit way, i.e., "by the backdoor". The learners are involved in situations that they may also encounter outside their classrooms and they are given communicative tasks they are to work on and solve, usually with a partner or in small groups. What teachers need to invest for preparing such lessons is their own creativity, as they have to come up with communicative situations which guide the learners into using a specific grammatical structure. The book first discusses the didactic and the linguistic theories involved and then translates these theoretical perspectives into actual teaching practice, focusing on the following grammatical phenomena: tense, aspect, modality, conditionals, passive voice, prepositions, phrasal verbs, verb complementation, pronouns and articles.

The monograph constitutes an attempt to demonstrate how Cognitive Grammar (CG) can be employed in the foreign language classroom with a view to aiding learners in better understanding the complexities of English grammar. Its theoretical part provides a brief overview of the main tenets of Cognitive Grammar as well as illustrating how the description of English tense and aspect can be approached from a traditional and a CG perspective. The empirical part reports the findings of an empirical study which aimed to compare the effects of instruction utilizing traditional pedagogic descriptions with those grounded in CG on the explicit an implicit knowledge of the Present Simple and Present Continuous Tenses. The book closes with the discussion of directions for further research when it comes to the application of CG to language pedagogy as well as some pedagogic implications

This book is about teaching and learning phrasal verbs in the context of both foreign and second language acquisition. Although both processes differ in terms of the degree to which learners are exposed to the target language through either formal classroom instruction or immersion in the language, the idea underlying this proposal is that both EFL and ESL learners can have similar levels of exposure to the language if the nature of constructions is clearly defined. Thus, in order to create a type of input that promotes category construction through both inductive and explicit instruction, it is necessary to depart from very different assumptions regarding the nature of mind, cognition, and the human experience with the physical world. For example, I claim that what we call mind is not a brain-only phenomenon but a flux of embodied experiences and agentive selections that are reflected in the linguistic system through the influence of speaker-meaning. This theoretical shift aims to connect Applied Cognitive Construction Grammar (ACCxG) with several disciplines such as psychology, cognitive science, philosophy, semiotics, linguistics, and second language acquisition (SLA) theory, to name a few. Clearly, the book is not programmatic, but aims to introduce a cognitive description of language in the context of pedagogical grammar.

In recent years, Cognitive Linguistics (CL) has established itself not only as a solid theoretical approach but also as an important source from which different applications to other fields have emerged. In this volume we identify some of the current, most relevant topics in applied CL-oriented studies – analyses of figurative language (both metaphor and metonymy) in use, constructions and typology –, and present high-quality research papers that illustrate best practices in the research foci identified and their application to different fields including intercultural communication, the psychology of emotions, second and first language acquisition, discourse analysis and translation studies. It is also shown how different methodologies –the use of linguistic corpora, psycholinguistic experiments or discourse analytic procedures– can shed some light on the basic premises of CL as well as providing insights into how CL can be applied in real world contexts. Finally, all the studies included in the volume are based on empirical data and there are some analyses of languages other than English (Japanese, Russian, Spanish, Danish, German and Polish), thus overcoming the contentions that CL-theoretically-based research is often based on linguistic intuition and focused only on the English language. We hope that the present volume will not only contribute to a better understanding of how CL can be applied but that it will also help to encourage, even further, more robust empirical research in this field. Originally published as a special issue of Review of Cognitive Linguistics 14:1 (2016).

This is the first book to present an account of literary meaning and effects drawing on our best understanding of mind and language in the form of a Cognitive Grammar. The contributors provide exemplary analyses of a range of literature from science fiction, dystopia, absurdism and graphic novels to the poetry of Wordsworth, Hopkins, Sassoon, Balassi, and Dylan Thomas, as well as Shakespeare, Chaucer, Barrett Browning, Whitman, Owen and others. The application of Cognitive Grammar allows the discussion of meaning, translation, ambience, action, reflection, multimodality, empathy, experience and literariness itself to be conducted in newly valid ways. With a Foreword by the creator of Cognitive Grammar, Ronald Langacker, and an Afterword by the cognitive scientist Todd Oakley, the book represents the latest advance in literary linguistics, cognitive poetics and literary critical practice.