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Describes a worksheet used by the author to help business communication students get the most out of a set of quantitative data. Describes how the worksheet walks students through a sequence of four activities (orientation, generalization, explanation, and exploration) that help them present and interpret visual data. Discusses benefits to students and instructors. Includes a completed data analysis worksheet. (SR)

The volume presents insights from cognitive linguistics with respect to grammar and their potential relevance to second and foreign language learning and teaching. After a detailed description of the tools of cognitive linguistics and corpus linguistics it deals with general issues of a pedagogical grammar as well as prototypical grammatical problems such as constructions, tense-aspect-modal markers, voice, case and transitivity, the expression of motion events, etc. and with applications of findings from language acquisition to second or foreign language learning (conceptual errors and contrastive analysis).

As observed in the introduction to Cognitive Linguistics: Current Applications and Future Perspectives, language pedagogy is interdisciplinary in character, crossing over into and closely collaborating with, among others, psycholinguistics and educational psychology. What Cognitive Linguistics (CL) brings to this multifaceted field of study – more than any other contemporary form of linguistics – is “a strong conceptual unity” (Kristiansen et al. 2006: 14). It is this unity in theoretical assumptions, basic units and constructs that is expected to offer a better insight into the nature of language and grammar and further improve the efficiency and effectiveness of existing second and foreign language teaching. It is no coincidence then that the past few years have witnessed a growing interest in cognitively oriented applied research (Pütz et al. 2001; Achard and Niemeier 2004; Tyler et al. 2005; Robinson and Ellis in press 2008). In this presentation we address two general questions. First, apart from this conceptual unity, what else does CL theory and description have to offer to language teaching and especially pedagogical grammar (PG)? Note that we take “pedagogical grammar,” the bridge between theory and practice, to metonymically stand for (i) research into pedagogical grammar and grammar pedagogy as a process and (ii) the outcome of that research in the form of a pedagogical grammar package for a given language. Compared with the areas of lexis and metaphor and their rich and varied research tradition within the CL framework (Boers and Lindstromberg 2006 and forthcoming; Littlemore and Low 2006), pedagogical grammar has received only scant attention. This imbalance motivates our second question: What are currently the main strands of grammar research into the CL-PG interface, what results have these studies yielded so far and what can we expect for the future? In answering both questions we present the main research results of the 14 papers of the edited volum