Cognition in ( inter ) action : multimodal metaphors produced during a lesson of German as a Foreign Language

The article explore how metaphoricity is expressed through the multimodal metaphors produced by a German-native-speaker teacher and Brazilian learners of German as a Foreign Language when discussing possible metaphorical meanings of the preposition and verbal prefix über. The lesson, which was taught for undergraduates at a Brazilian university, was videotaped. The interactions were transcribed using the conventions GAT 2 and gestures were described based on Cienki (2010). Based on the concepts of Conceptual Fluency by Danesi (1995) as well as the dynamic aspects of metaphoricity by Müller and Cienki (2009), the analysis revealed how metaphor thinking is indeed embodied and how such embodiment can be explored in the classroom.


Introdução
For cognitive linguists, language is considered an integral part of our cognition.Therefore, learning a new language is also a cognitive process.Recent research in the field of German as a Foreign Language (DaF) shows an improvement in the learning of prepositions when applying a cognitive approach (SCHELLER, 2008, GRASS, 2014, ROCHE and SCHELLER, 2014).Danesi (2008, p. 231) has already advocated for the inclusion of the target language's cognitive and sociocultural system in Second Language Teaching so that learners have a systematic, sequential and integrated approach to the system.
Considering that some German verbal prefixes have highly metaphorical meaning, DaF-learners might face some difficulty at learning them, especially when producing language (BELLAVIA, 2007).
Therefore, teaching cognitive aspects of a second language (L2) is a way to help advanced learners understand better as well as retain lexical units (LITTLEMORE and LOW, 2006;BELLAVIA, 2007;BOERS and LINDSTROMBERG, 2008;LITTLEMORE, 2009).Moreover, learners tend to recognize and analyses conceptual aspects, such as metaphorical meanings, of a new lexical unit when learning a new language (LITTLEMORE, 2008(LITTLEMORE, , 2009;;PICKEN, 2007).
Therefore, the study of multimodal metaphors as well as their degree of metaphoricity in teacherstudent interactions will help us understand the process of metaphorical meaning negotiation in the classroom and shed some light on the role of conceptual fluency in Foreign Language Teaching and Learning.According to Cienki (2008, p.16) "[g]esture can provide an important locus for cognitive linguistic research on metaphor because it physically manifests the tenet that (many) metaphors are grounded in embodied action".Additionally, metaphoricity is a measurement of how evident a metaphor for the interlocutors in an interaction can be and gestures are the tool used by interlocutor to make metaphors more evident (MÜLLER and CIENKI, 2009;MÜLLER and TAG, 2010).
The article focuses on the analysis of multimodal metaphors produced by a German-nativespeaker teacher and Brazilian learners of German as a Foreign Language when discussing possible metaphorical meanings of the preposition and verbal prefix über.The analysis offered insights not only to the context of production but also to the understanding of these metaphorical meanings.foundations alongside Langacker's (1987Langacker's ( , 1991) ) Cognitive Grammar.One of the exponents of a cognitive-oriented approach to FLT is Low (1988), who discusses the metaphorical language functions and pedagogical implications for didactic material.Radden (1994), in turn, illustrates the importance of using image schemas and conceptual metaphors to explain the systematic coherence of metaphorical expressions in the target language.His argument is based on the idea that a considerable part of the lexicon is iconically -schematically -motivated, and therefore it is cognitively easier for the learners to understand these lexical terms.Therefore, one can say that the metaphorical meanings of German verbs, whose prefixes are formed by prepositions, were motivated by the concrete meaning of these prepositions.This metaphorical motivation can be explained to learners in order to help them recognize meaning patterns in the L2.Bellavia (2007) shows that the knowledge of cognitive principles that regulate the semantic structure of language allows learners to interact with a more limited set of rules that can be used in a larger number of linguistic phenomena.
He claims that language learners may produce L2 with a high degree of verbal fluency (grammatical and communicative competence), but they lack conceptual appropriateness.In his words: students "speak" with the formal structures of the target language, but they "think" in terms of their native conceptual system: i.e., students typically use target language words and structures as "carriers" of their own native language concepts (DANESI, 1995, p.5).
On the other hand, if students can match their verbal fluency to the conceptual knowledge in the L2, they become conceptually fluent.Additionally, "to be conceptually fluent in a language is to know, in large part, how that language 'reflects' or encodes concepts on the basis of metaphorical reasoning" (DANESI, 1995, p.5).Therefore, as metaphorical reasoning is part of the native speaker competence, then it should be taught like other competences, such as grammatical and communication.
Given the importance of the conceptual metaphor in the process of learning a foreign language, the language embodiment in teachers and students must be considered when analyzing the process of teaching and/or learning metaphors, as such embodiment will certainly be reflected in the teacher-student interaction when negotiation of meaning takes place, since such negotiation is made mostly through conversation.Cienki (2010)  Therefore, monomodal metaphor would be less evident to speakers during an interaction than verbogestural or multimodal metaphors, since the use of different modalities bring the metaphoricity to the focus of the conversation and make the metaphor more evident.In other words, when using a verbogestural metaphor, the speaker expresses the target domain verbally, but the source domain is represented by the gesture.This visual representation is both a proof of language embodiment and an interactional strategy to bring metaphoricity to the focus of the conversation.
Müller and Tag (2010) also discuss this dynamic view of metaphor and relates verbo-gestural metaphors to cognitive processes such as foregrounding and profiling.Following iconicity, interactive as well as semantic and syntactic principals, they suggest different strategies used by speakers to make gestures more salient to their interlocutors which foreground metaphoricity during interaction.According to them, by making a verbogestural compound more evident to the interlocutor, the speaker active the metaphoricity.Therefore, Müller and Tag, (2010, p.6) state: "what is interactively foregrounded is where the focus of attention sits, it is also cognitively active".
Moreover, the analysis of metaphorical gestures contributes to solve the problem of circularity of Conceptual Metaphor Theory, for they are visual evidences of metaphor mapping.
Thereby, one important contribution of metaphor gesture studies to cognitive metaphor theory lies in the support provided through visible acting out of gestures for the indication of the existence of conceptual metaphors, discouraging the argument of the linguistic circularity as evidence for the existence of conceptual structures guiding cognition.(SCHRÖDER, 2018, p.496).

Analysis
The analyses were based on data collected in

Example 1: über as a preposition
In the following sequence, a native German It's the same as more.
In line 13 he explicitly asks the meaning of this

3.2.Example 2: verbal prefix in überfliegen
In this sequence, which is part of the same task, students and teacher discuss the meaning of the verb überfliegen (skim over), in the sentence Der Student hat den Text rasch überflogen (The student has quickly skimmed over the text).This verb is a Signo [ISSN 1982[ISSN -2014]].Santa Cruz do Sul, v. 44, nº 79, p. 18-28, jan./abril, 2019.
http://online.unisc.br/seer/index.php/signonon-separable verb in German, formed by the suffix über.In this context, the verb is highly metaphorical and means to read a text quickly in order to get its main idea(s).After S8 read the sentence aloud, teacher makes sure students understand the sentence, but he recognizes that the verb überfliegen might be difficult to explain due to its highly metaphoricity: This explanation is not entirely wrong, but covers only some aspects of the verb überfliegen (reading fast and not precisely).The main purpose of the action, which is getting the main idea of the text, was not clear through this explanation.It is clear in the next sequences that this incomplete explanation prevents the students to understand the whole concept of überfliegen: 021 S8: dyNAmik lektÜre, "Dynamic reading" 022 seri:a leitura diNAmica (-) algo, Would that be speed reading?
Signo [ISSN 1982[ISSN -2014]].Santa Cruz do Sul, v. 44, nº 79, p. 18- There is nothing to do with the airplane.In this image-schema , the TR overcomes a LM that is seen in its entirety.The path crossed by TRas well as the morphological structure -is uninterrupted and extends over the entire surface of the LM (BELLAVIA, 2007, p. 138).According to Bellavia (2007, p. 140)  Signo [ISSN 1982[ISSN -2014]].Santa Cruz do Sul, v. 44, nº 79, p. 18 -28, jan./abril, 2019.http://online.unisc.br/seer/index.php/signoThe process of reading quickly is seen as the eyes flying over the text.Since the reader wants to grasp the global meaning of the text, they observe the surface of the text quickly, without 'going through it'.That is, not stopping at any point in the essay.The text is perceived as a limited region in the space (we say in German 'field of vision') that is crossed by the reader as well as their eyes.(BELLAVIA, 2007, p. 140-141).
Making this analogy could be a more suitable alternative to explaining überfliegen.(BARBOSA, 2015) showed how a Brazilian teacher and advanced speaker of German, who worked with the same worksheet, proposed to his students this analogy.He drew the student's attention to the fact that one flies over a text to have a panoramic or broad view of it (getting its main idea), as well as one has a panoramic view of a city when flying over it in an airplane, for example.His explanation was accompanied by gestures and this visual aid made the metaphor clearer to students.
Nevertheless, it is not the aim here to discuss why the German-teacher did not activate this metaphor verbally or visually.As Müller and Tag (2010) explain, activating metaphoricity is an interactional process that involves different cognitive strategies throughout the conversation.I believe that the analysis could reveal this process, but it cannot reveal the reasons for doing it, though.In the next session, I will comment briefly on the analysis results and its possible pedagogical implications.

Conclusion
The analyses show how conceptual fluency can be a determining factor to mastering a foreign language.The two brief multimodal analyses of teacher-student interactions revealed to us how metaphorical thinking is indeed embodied and how such embodiment can be explored in the classroom.
Our first case showed how the access to the primary metaphor MORE IS UP helped the students to understanding the metaphorical meaning of über in the sentence Er hat über 500 Euro, which was confirmed by their gestures.On the other hand, as the students did not have access to the metaphorical conceptualizations underneath the concept of überfliegen, a situation of misunderstanding takes place instead of an opportunity for meaning negotiation, since the students understood only partially the meaning of the verb (überfliegen is understood as speed reading).
Therefore, having access to the conceptualizations that relies underneath metaphors is crucial to understand not only idioms, but verbs and expressions that occurs very often in a language.
Moreover, applying a multimodal perspective to the analysis of teacher-learner interaction in the classroom helped us to describe not only the process of meaning negotiation during these interactions, but also to reveal the metaphorical thinking happening online during the time of conversation, for the gestures produced by teacher and learners, which gives us access to the metaphor process (MÜLLER and CIENKI, 2009;MÜLLER and TAG, 2010).
In addition, Bellavia (2007, p. 330) points out the importance of teachers providing their students with visual aids to illustrate possible cognitive aspects of lexical items, such as the metaphorical mappings.
Therefore, the analysis can also help to think how gestures can be introduced in the Foreign Language Teaching as a kind of visual aid.Explaining to the Signo [ISSN 1982[ISSN -2014]].Santa Cruz do Sul, v. 44, nº 79, p. 18- fluency, metaphoricity and multimodal metaphor in the FL teaching and learning Considering the application of Cognitive Linguistics in Foreign Language Teaching (FLT), Lakoff and Johnson's (1980) Cognitive Metaphor Theory (CMT) is one of the most important theoretical abbreviations: right open hand (ROH), closed right hand (CRH), left open hand (LOH), left closed hand (LCH), both hands (2H), stretched fingers (SF), palm up (PU), palm down (PD).A brief description of the gestures is given in the transcription.A more detailed description with pictures is made further in the analysis.Since I analyzed gestures that were used to explain the metaphorical concept conveyed by the preposition in the example sentence and two students answered assertively, showing that they do understand the sentence.Both students' and Signo[ISSN 1982[ISSN  -2014]].Santa Cruz do Sul, v. 44, nº 79, p. 18-28, jan./abril, 2019.http://online.unisc.br/seer/index.php/signoüber teacher's speech are accompanied by similar gestures and we see in lines 14, 15 and 16.S5: aCImaG: lifts the ROH-SF with the palm away from the body.It goes up to his head laterally to the body, S6: aCIma G: lifts the ROH-PD-SF slightly over his head.He repeats the gesture twice.Picture 1: students express their understanding of über in the sentence Er hat über 500 Euro.Teacher: ((nodding to S5 and S6))G: lifts LOH-PD over his head then makes outwards cycling gesture, repeating it quickly three times.Picture 2: teacher agrees with students about the meaning of über in the sentence Er hat über 500 Euro.The gestures produced by the teacher, as well as by the students, are a representation of the metaphorical meaning embedded in the preposition über, with the gesture stroke of S5 and S6 coinciding with the uttering of the Portuguese translation of über "acima".In the sentence, this preposition does not actually mean over (physically), but rather "more than" (quantity).This metaphorical meaning is motivated by conceptual metaphor MORE IS UP.Such primary metaphor comes from basic experiences in our daily lives."If you add more of a substance or of physical objects to a container or pile, the level goes up" (LAKOFF; JOHNSON, 2013, p.16).In this case, the teacher's and students' gestures depicts the very DOWN-UP scheme of that is presented in the source domain of this experiential based metaphor.Lakoff (1987, p. 286) points out that the source domain VERTICALITY is directly mapped onto the target domain QUANTITY.Picture 3: DOWN-UP scheme presented in the source domain of MORE IS UP which is depicted by the students' and teacher's gesture.Müller and Cienki (2014, p. 1770) have already pointed out that "the Target Domain idea is represented by a gestural expression of the Source Domain idea for understanding it."Therefore, when both teacher and students make a gesture while they say "über" they are producing a multimodal metaphor, that is, a metaphor that occurs in both speech and gesture.As multimodal metaphors are usually produced when speakers want to reinforce the metaphor, one can say that teacher is drawing students' attention to the very meaning of über in that sentence, as well as students are confirming their understanding of it.The confirmation is reinforced by other interactional elements, such as teacher nodding in accordance while students S5 and S6 keep eye contact with him.The meaning is, thus, negotiated through the interaction in the classroom, rather than just taught by the teacher.
<<?RASCH ist das glEIche wie schnell;> writing on the board>> So, quick is the same of fast.016 überFLIEgen (.) heißt (.); ((imitates someone reading a text very fast)) 017 <<ganz SCHNELL lesen;> LCH with index finger stretched moving from up to down on the worksheet in a wave-shape path>> To read very fast 018 <<nicht GENAU nicht exAkt,> LCH with index finger pointing up and moving from right to the left>> Not precisely, not exactly.019 <<(.) aber GANZ schnell;> moving LOH-PD-SF from right to the left over the worksheet >> But very fast.020 das heißt (.) wa:s für eine iDEE haben wir mit Über hier, That means… what kind of meaning does über have here?Right?To explain the verb, the teacher uses different multimodal interactional elements, as gazing at his gesture and making sounds.He looks at the worksheet he holds with his right hand and points at it with his left index finger, moving it rapidly from right to the left over the worksheet.He simultaneously moves his head rapidly from right to left while he makes a sound to illustrate how fast he reads the (imaginary) text.Afterwards he verbally reinforces that überfliegen means "to read a text not precisely but very fast," as we see in lines 17, 18 and 19.T: überFLIEgen (.) heißt (.); ((imitates someone reading a text very fast)) G: he points to the worksheet with his index finger and moves it rapidly from right to the left, following it with his head at the same speed.At the same time, he makes a sound of speediness.Picture 4: teacher imitates überfliegen in the sentence der Student hat den Text rasch überflogen.
In lines 21 and 22, Student S8 asks if the meaning of the verb is leitura dinâmica (speed reading), a neurolinguistic reading methodology that used to be popular in Brazil and helps a reader to read a large amount of reading in only a few hours.(BARBOSA, 2015) analyzed this sequence from a non-interactional and only a verbal perspective.She explained that überfliegen might be a dead metaphor to the German-native-speaker teacher, as he failed to realize metaphorical aspects of über in the verb.Although he admitted, in line 27, that the verb is metaphorical, he failed to reconstrue this metaphoricity to his students, since he states, in line 28, that this example has nothing to do with the "airplane".The example Das Flugzeug fliegt über die Stadt (the airplane flies over the city) had been already discussed earlier in the lesson.Nevertheless, when the same sequence is analyzed from an interactional-multimodal perspective, one can see that the teacher, in fact, embodies the meaning of the prefix über.When explaining the verb in lines 17, 18 and 19, he repeats the same explanation verbally (ganz schnell -very fast), but he does not repeat the same gesture.In line 19, he moves his LOH-PD-SF from right to the left over the worksheet, depicting the typical imageschema of über as an inseparable verbal prefix.
first gesture for ganz schnell in line 17.T: aber GANZ schnell; G: moving LOH-PD-SF from right to the left over the worksheet Picture 6: second gesture for ganz schnell in line 19.

Picture 7 :
typical use of über as a verbal prefix (adapted from BELLAVIA, 2007, p.138) Bellavia (2007) compares, for instance, the literal sentence Das Flugzeug überflog den Ozean (the airplane flew over the ocean) to the metaphorical sentence Er überflog rasch den Text (he quickly skimmed over the text) and explains: