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development of conceptual thinking and disciplinary knowledge. Practical suggestions of how some of the key principles could be embedded into current EAP teaching practice will be briefly highlighted.


COGNITIVE LINGUISTICS AND THE LANGUAGE USER


Language reflects how we conceptualise the world. Through the language we have available to us, we are able to convey to others how we conceptually relate to, organise and categorise the world around us. This assumption is best articulated in a sub-field of Applied Linguistics known as cognitive linguistics, an approach to studying natural language that had its origins in the late seventies and eighties (e.g., Lakoff & Johnson, 1980, Langacker 1987, Talmy 1985). In line with functional approaches to language (Halliday, 1994), cognitive linguists view all aspects of language (lexico-grammatical structures, phonology) as usage-based and inherently meaningful (Giovanelli, 2014). Crucially, and relevant for purpose of this paper, meaning does not reside in a text (either spoken or written) which then has to be retrieved by the language user, nor does the language user impose meaning on a text, rather meaning is created as the reader, or listener, critically engages with the words and grammatical patterns within that text. In any context, but in an EAP context most particularly, students come with a diverse range of learning experiences, cultural expectations and habits of thought already shaped through the languages they have previously been exposed to. The words on the page they read, or listen to in a conversation, activate and dynamically interact with these schemas to create meaning.


Sally Zacharias


Cognitive linguists claim that our cognitive processes are embedded in all aspects of language, knowledge building and learning (Giovanelli, 2014). One central cognitive process, which features throughout all these aspects, is the notion of construal: our conceptions are not neutral, but are always taken from a particular perspective (Langacker, 2008). This idea will be exemplified more fully in the following section, but essentially, this means that language provides an array of different lenses through which we can conceptualise the world around us (Boroditsky, 2001). The better EAP practitioners and their students understand how language and our minds interact with language to construct different perspectives, conceptual thought and meaning, the more resources they have available to help them to engage critically, at a conceptual level, with written and spoken texts in an EAP context. This paper sets out to provide the reader with a brief insight into thinking about academic language from a cognitive perspective. A word of warning, it does not offer a set of off-the-shelf resources, but instead suggests how cognitive linguistic principles could be eventually applied to EAP contexts, by inviting the reader to engage with some examples of authentic academic language. The following introduces one of the most important cognitive linguistic phenomena involved in the development of abstract thought, namely, metaphorical reasoning.


METAPHORICAL REASONING Metaphorical reasoning abounds in pedagogical settings as metaphors are used to make sense of and communicate hard- to-understand, subject-specific abstract concepts that often have no clear referent in the physical world. A metaphor is when


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