The purpose of this thesis is to propose the easy and intuitive way to teach Korean body idioms which are metaphoric and containing one country’s cultures and customs through entertainment news and a cognitive semantic approach.
As idioms are high context lexicons that can not be easily acquired without the interaction between bodily experience?social backgrounds?members of societies, this thesis aims to prove educational methodology which can help the foreign students to understand Korean cultures, concepts and circumstances.
Unlike the traditional theory of idioms which regards idioms as dead metaphors, cognitive linguistic theory defined its position that idioms are not dead metaphors rather than they have real metaphor. It also presents that we hardly are able to anticipate the meaning of idioms, but substantial part of those meanings are motivated by our concept systems.
Therefore, the way of cramming method of teaching under the concept that idioms have new meanings should be changed as it makes difficulties in the perspective of comprehension and expression, and should look for the new measures.
In this light, the idiom education based on cognitive linguistics explains the relationship between the producing principles of meanings, connection between meanings and structures, and language users focus on ‘meaning’. Through this, we can find the way to help the learners to improve the ability of inferring different idioms, and understanding Korean native speaker’s concepts and cultures by themselves.
Thus, this thesis dealing with cognitive linguistics approach to teach Korean body idioms has following significances.
Firstly, through prototype theory teaching method, it assists Korean learners to better understand the idioms and to make the best use of those idioms in real daily life as well.
Second of all, it provides educational contents which supports to understand Korean cognitive thought, and Korean cultures.
Thirdly, it produces easy way and medium to study idioms, and it arranges foundation of learner centered learning environment.
To the next, this thesis is summarized as follows.
In chapter 1, this thesis introduces the purpose of study and emphasizes the necessities, and examines various theories on the idioms and metaphors retaining its feasibility of a research.
In chapter 2, it establishes premises for Korean idiom education in the perspective of cognitive linguistics, in other words, sets up body idioms’ concepts and types which are the subject of this study. Based on this criteria, examines the body idiom’s educational methodology and selects the most valid approaches.
In chapter 3, prior to presenting the body idiom teaching and learning model using entertainment news, it produces the values and selection methods of entertainment news used for lexical education, and states the analysis of teaching and learning model.
In chapter 4, based on the current used idiom dictionaries, Korean language books as a foreign language at educational spots, and the frequency of corpus, it lists frequently used body idioms, and classifies the characteristic of body idioms into metaphor, metonymy, and conceptual blending in the perspective of cognitive linguistics. On this basis, it provides the level based teaching and learning method which enables to infer contextually for body idioms by organizing entertainment news.
In chapter 5, it mentions the importance of this study that may presents the way of teaching body idioms in a effective way for the teachers looking for a new educational approach, also it declares this research’ limits which miss the results of effectiveness of methodology, and give proof of proper chosen idioms.