Leveraging cognitive linguistic approaches to grammar teaching with multimedia animations

The present paper reports on a study which aims to explore the potential of using multimedia animations to make grammar principles of cognitive linguistic explanations more transparent to learners. Fourty-nine students of German received instruction on the German passive voice. A first group (CA) worked with a cognitive linguistic explanation of the German passive by means of multimedia animations and performed tasks that aimed to foster the relevant conceptualization processes. Another group (TA) was presented with a form-based explanation of the German passive mainly focusing on the syntactic features. The results show that the CA group significantly outperformed the TA group, especially in the tasks where the passive was tested in larger discursive contexts and made use of the different types of passive sentences in a more appropriate way.