APPROACHING THE VOCABULARY OF EMOTIONS IN HIGHER-EDUCATION ESP SETTINGS THROUGH CONCEPTUAL METAPHORS

Conceptual Metaphor Theory (henceforth CMT) [1, 2] has proved to be a comprehensive approach to depict the connections of a range of expressions related to a variety of domains of experience in a coherent way. CMT suggests that conceptual metaphor sets like HAPPY IS UP and SAD IS DOWN guide our understanding of positive and negative experiences via notions connected to verticality. Moreover, conceptual metaphors as the aforementioned ones allow for expressions related to various domains of experience to be used across languages in a variety of ways. For example, conceptual metaphors related to the domain of emotion provide a logic for the processing and use of linguistic expressions related to verticality in English such as "cheer up!" or "I'm just feeling down in the dumps", and in Spanish like, "Subir el animo" or "Ultimamente tengo la moral por los suelos". CMT has also proved to be a theory with powerful pedagogical applications, especially to deal with vocabulary in the English as a Foreign Language (EFL) classroom [3-5]. In this paper we present a small pedagogical implementation of the conceptual metaphor approach to deal with a set of expressions belonging to the domain of emotions in an English for Specific Purposes (ESP) course held at a Spanish university. We explore the instructional effects of a series of activities exploiting metaphors of basic emotions like happiness and sadness. Data were collected by means of a pre-test and a post-test, and were processed quantitatively afterwards. Results show the effects of this pedagogical intervention and call for further research in this particular realm.