Abstract:

Lexical awareness is a very important dimension within language teaching and learning fields. The more we know about children mental lexicon organisation, the more effective our pedagogical practices may be, which emphasizes the importance of a truly comprehensive connection between Research and Education. However, in many didactic resources, this kind of information is not taken into account, leading to a dichotomous way of teaching lexical relations (Baptista et al., 2017). This idea was the starting point for the Língua e Cidadania: das relações entre palavras ao conhecimento do mundo Project, bearing in mind the interactions between lexicon, culture and citizenship and how they may interfere with didactic issues. As a matter of fact, if lexicon conveys a specific perspective of the world, the narrower the pedagogical approach is, the more limited children lexical awareness will be.

Therefore, we will be conducting a three-step presentation. First of all, we will present a brief summary of lexical semantic relations (Lyons, 1977; Coseriu, 1991; Cruse, 2001), mainly of antonymy, because it is the core of an exploratory study we undertook at Primary School context. Opposition is a central notion, but it does not mean that all of the connections between words are dichotomous.

Within this multiple lexical relations framework (Choupina et al., 2013), supported by different linguistic criteria (Lehmann & Martin-Berthet, 2008), we will then explain how the above-mentioned study (Baptista et al., 2018) was held. It aimed at verifying if primary school pupils intuitively organise their mental lexicon in a dichotomous way. Second-grade Portuguese pupils were told three narratives while paying attention to some illustrations related to the story they were listening to. These narratives were made up of words that may be opposite to each other but may also establish some other kind of relations according to the linguistic and the extralinguistic context. Children had to organise these words in three different diagrammatic options (two bags in a first exercise, ten hangers with two ends each in the second, and a staircase with several steps, in the third). The answers were very different. Some children grouped words under the same morphological basis or following specific semantic and pragmatic criteria. Some decided to write down one lexical item under each end of the hanger, some registered more than two words in the middle of the hanger. Different strategies of grouping words may correspond to different ways of organising the mental lexicon and language teaching should take this idea into consideration.

In a world where digital devices are at the centre of children’s lives, we are aware of the importance that information and communication technologies have in each classroom, within a gamified approach (Foncubierta & Rodríguez, 2015). Therefore, we found it very useful to propose an augmented reality application, because it “allows the user to see the real world with virtual computer-generated objects superimposed or merged with real surroundings” (Martín-Gutierrez et al., 2015, p. 753). By combining verbal and visual representations, this app caters for making the cognitive complexity of lexical antonyms obvious when manipulating the image, in a way that it enhances the possibility of occurrence of distinct words in the same context and for the same view (or not) of different perspectives.

Keywords:

Antonymy, learning innovation, virtual and augmented reality.