Exploring methodological issues in Applied Cognitive Linguistics teaching materials

Abstract Applied Cognitive Linguistics (ACL) has so far largely failed to concretize its potential to inform language teaching. This is evidenced by the scarcity of cognitive-pedagogical teaching materials on the market. This article contends that the problem may not lie in the theory itself as much as in the way it is being transposed in teaching materials, because novel theories are unlikely to be adopted without a proper pedagogical vehicle ( Numa Markee 1997 ). To investigate this hypothesis, this article reviews issues with the cognitive-pedagogical approach to preface a principled evaluation of textbooks tapping into the ACL framework. The article adopts an instrumental case study design and surveys a corpus of 3 published textbooks using a principled list of criteria. The data confirms that available cognitive-pedagogical teaching materials do not meet some of the minimum requirements for successful implementation in the FL classroom as defined by materials development research ( Tomlinson & Masuhara 2018 ). The paper ends with some practical suggestions for the development of more effective teaching materials adopting a CL approach, which is hypothesized to help further the ACL agenda in the language classroom.