Browsing by Author "Terbak, Manal"

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    Investigating concreteness and abstractness vis a vis decoding linguistics’ concepts
    (Université De Larbi Ben M’hidi Oum EL Bouaghi, 2022) Terbak, Manal; Boussaid, Nesrine; Ayadi, Karim
    For a very long time, theorizing in the cognitive sciences was dominated by the assumption that abstract concepts, which lack a perceivable referent, can only be handled by amodal or verbal linguistic representations. In the last years, however, refined grounded cognition theories emphasizing the importance of emotional and introspective information for abstract concepts, in addition to verbal associations and sensorimotor information, have received increasing support.Accordingly, The Algerian EFL students are facing serious difficilties in decoding abstract concepts particularly the ones related to linguistics due to the complex nature of linguistics itself and the perplexing abstract concepts.This research aims at detecting the main difficulties and challenges faced by both teachers and students in the process of teaching / learning linguistics' abstract concepts. In order to check the validity of this study, a hypothesis has been raised: second year students have more problems with decoding abstract linguistic concepts than the concrete ones. To verify the validity of this hypothesis, the qualitative quantitative methods were employed by means of two questionnaires in addition to classroom observation. The first questionnaire was administred to thirty-nine English students at English departement,while the other questionnaire was administred to ten linguistics teachers in the same departement, along with attending second year linguistics sessions with the eight groups for a close classroom observation.The results of the questionnaires and the the classroom observation show that both the learners and teachers have difficulties in learning / teaching abstract concepts related to linguistics due to their complex nature and to other circumstances such as: the learning approach ,methodology and atmosphere. Many suggestions were delivered by both teachers and students to enhace the teaching/ learning process, which are: adopting to learner-centured interactional approach along with integrating technology to undermine the difficulties faced with abstract concepts.