Learning Attitudes of Chinese Learners (PLE): Grammar Metaphor as a Tool for Researching the Acquisition Process

摘要

This paper reports on research results achieved on the attempt to understand general learning behaviour of oriental learners, mainly Chinese students, studying Portuguese (PFL). Starting from the concept of 'grammatical metaphor' as it is conceived in the framework of systemic functional linguistics (Halliday, 1982, 1985, 1994, 1998, 2004; Halliday & Martin, 1993; Martin, 1992, 1995b, 1993b; Christie & Martin, 1997; Martin & Veel, 1998) it was possible to identify dissimilar acquisition attitudes between oriental and occidental students regarding the metaphoric meaning. These distinct attitudes possibly explain the well known lack of success achieved at intermediate levels (A2-B1 levels of the CEFR) by the students. At these levels, it is crucial for learners to deal with texts that produce a whole of semantic configurations related with Non-finite constructions where nominalization and grammatical metaphor are strongly involved. A few pedagogic devices combining metaphoric disjunction, information about the genres enrolled and work at the Register level will be suggested. It will be argued that grammatical metaphor as an intriguing concept in a functional theory of language is a valuable tool in applied linguistics, including language teaching, for investigating the learning processes (writing and reading) and for intervening in the processes as well.