COGNITIVE IMPLEMENTATION OF INCONGRUENT L2/C2 PEDAGOGIES IN TERTIARY EDUCATION. TEACHING ENGLISH LITERATURE TO SPANISH UNDERGRADUATE STUDENTS IN SPAIN HOSTING L2 CONCEPTUAL METAPHORS

Abstract

Enactive knowledge is knowledge acquired when an organism acts in an environment. Enactivating for the first time any experimental literary text is an awkward cognitive task in a first language/culture L1/C1 environment, but situated in a L2/C2 teaching/learning context it constitutes a real cognitive Gordian knot. This complex sociocognitive situation is framed in a view of language as a central aspect of human socio-cultural situatedness. From a general view of cognition as action, in this paper we are concerned with the organization of a method that facilitates this challenging teaching/learning situation:  a culture-specific L1 Spanish learning process of a L2 experimental English literary text in Tertiary Education in Gran Canaria (Spain). The case study described here explores the crosslinguistic and crosscultural conditions in which Spanish undergraduates understand the way English experimental writers think, during tasks of reading 17th or 20th c. English texts from the Enlightenment, Modernism, and Postmodernism. So far, related Spanish academic practices have mostly relied on unidirectional conduit and transmission metaphors, thus breaking the conceptual, linguistic, and cultural organization of original texts that further artfully break the organization of ordinary English language to enhance the reader’s perception of other living minds and experiences. Both Cognitive Poetics and its more dynamicist extension Biopoetics seem to be a true-to-life methodological framework for a unifying reading of texts from different cultures, times and genres. Moreover, Cognitive Semantics resumes 17th c. foundational inquiries related to thought, language and culture, as altered by human perception, in the most advanced transversal framework of Cognitive Sciences. This paper is initially framed within a contrastive Conceptual Metaphor dynamics of meaning and knowledge of the World constructions in search of a congruent first immersion by L1/C1 Spanish students into the cultural differences of these innovative  L2/C2 English texts.