Brian Birdsell | Hirosaki University, College of Humanities (original) (raw)

Papers by Brian Birdsell

JALT Postconference Publication - Issue 2021.1; August 2022

Technological changes have the power to disrupt standard educational practices. One recent advanc... more Technological changes have the power to disrupt standard educational practices. One recent advancement is neural machine translation (NMT) systems such as Google Translate and DeepL which due to their widespread use have already impacted foreign language education. To explore the effect of NMTs on student essay writing and teachers’ evaluation of it, a small-scale study was conducted in which students were divided into two groups, one group used the NMT DeepL and the other did not. English teachers assessed these essays by evaluating them using a standard rubric and then judging whether they believed NMT was used. Results from a Mann-Whitney U Test indicate that teachers tend to evaluate essays that used NMT higher than those that did not and they can accurately judge whether NMT was used. Implications of this study are discussed as well as possible ways to effectively use NMT in the writing classroom. As technology continues to improve, foreign language education also has to evolve...

IAFOR Journal of Psychology & the Behavioral Sciences

Visual metaphors deliberately deviate from the literal representation of an object. The resulting... more Visual metaphors deliberately deviate from the literal representation of an object. The resulting incongruity has the potential to be more engaging and memorable for the viewer and thus are frequently used as a design feature in advertisements. Recently, researchers have begun to more thoroughly examine the advantages that visual metaphors play in advertisements and this study contributes to this growing body of research. Two experiments were conducted using sets of paired advertisements for the same product or social awareness campaign based on one of them being a visual metaphor and the other being a visual non-metaphor to explore if there was a visual- metaphor effect. In Experiment 1, participants rated these adverts based on three criteria, effectiveness, engagement, and a metaphorical framing effect along with an open-ended question. In Experiment 2, two additional variables were included, comprehensibility and creativity. Results support the view that visual metaphors tend to...

21世紀教育フォーラム, Mar 31, 2014

The Proceedings of the Annual Convention of the Japanese Psychological Association, 2021

The Proceedings of the Annual Convention of the Japanese Psychological Association, 2020

The study of metaphor is an interdisciplinary endeavor crossing such fields as cognitive linguist... more The study of metaphor is an interdisciplinary endeavor crossing such fields as cognitive linguistics, psychology, and creativity studies. Two important conclusions on the nature of metaphor have been drawn to date: (1) the ability to use metaphor is a normal human cognitive ability and widespread in language; (2) metaphor is not a unitary construct and varies greatly from the highly familiar and conventional to the creative. Viewing metaphor as lying along a continuum, this thesis narrows the concept of metaphoric competence to creative metaphoric competence, which looks at this ability from a creativity perspective. In this thesis, it is hypothesized that creative metaphoric competence is an underlying competency, which is related to a more general creative competence, and therefore is projected onto both the L1 (Japanese) and L2 (English). In order to test this hypothesis, data from creative metaphor production tasks were collected in both languages. In addition, a number of creat...

This study examined one dimension of metaphoric competence, specifically creative metaphor produc... more This study examined one dimension of metaphoric competence, specifically creative metaphor production, and analyzed this ability in both a first and second language. Viewing metaphoric competence as a multifaceted construct that lies on a continuum from the highly conventional to the highly creative is widely recognized in the field of cognitive linguistics (see Goatly, 2011; Littlemore, 2010). However, there is scarce research that analyzes creative metaphor production in individuals using multiple languages. Creative metaphors, as opposed to conventional ones that rely extensively on lexical retrieval, require the speaker to combine concepts in unfamiliar and novel ways. That is to say, it relies on constructing and exploring conceptual combinations that allow new properties to emerge and this reflects on a small scale the creative process (Finke, Ward, & Smith, 1992; Miall, 1987). This article reports on an exploratory study that aimed to measure participants’ creative metaphoric...

Although much is known about the importance of using visual aids in the foreign language classroo... more Although much is known about the importance of using visual aids in the foreign language classroom, awareness of what relationship these images have with the text and how they provide teaching opportunities for the lesson is severely limited n this article, rst review research that assesses how images are used in language learning textbooks esearch points out for the need to nd ways to use images in more pedagogically meaningful ways. One potential area that needs to be further explored, as a possible way to accomplish this, is the use of visual metaphors. Metaphors are an essential part of written and spoken language, but also extend to other modes like images (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980; Forceville, 1996). I then address previous research into pictorial and multimodal metaphors. Finally, I argue that using these types of visual metaphors in a language-learning context provide learning opportunities for the students to discuss social issues and also enhance their creative and critical ...

Two key features of Conceptual Metaphor Theory are that metaphors appear in multiple modes of com... more Two key features of Conceptual Metaphor Theory are that metaphors appear in multiple modes of communication from language to gestures to pictures and that metaphors scaffold our understanding of abstract concepts by grounding them in embodied, physically experienced concepts. In an exploratory study, we investigated metaphor production and interpretation using cross modal stimuli (verbal and pictorial). Native Japanese participants viewed an abstract word in the textual mode, in the form of an incomplete copula metaphor (Friendship is ...), and then saw six images of concrete entities (castle, heater, colored pencils, etc.). They chose one of these image concepts to complete the copula metaphor and then provided an interpretation of it. In this paper, we first analyze these choice selections using descriptive statistics. Results indicate that there is a wide amount of variability among these selected responses. Secondly, we analyze the interpretations, which use (1) external or syst...

JALT Postconference Publication - Issue 2020.1; August 2021, 2021

Phrasal verbs (PVs) are notoriously difficult for language learners since they are numerous in nu... more Phrasal verbs (PVs) are notoriously difficult for language learners since they are numerous in number, highly polysemous, as well as metaphorical, and the meaning is often opaque. Over the past two decades, researchers have shown the benefits of using a cognitive linguistic approach to teaching them. Expanding this line of research, a quasi-experimental study was conducted to investigate the effects of an embodied approach to teaching phrasal verbs. An embodied learning approach focuses on movement, gesture, and enactment as a way to facilitate language learning. Student participants (N = 80) were divided into 3 groups; an L1 translation approach group, a cognitive approach group, and an embodied learning approach group. They took pre- and post-PV tests and learned 29 PVs in 2 teaching interventions. All students significantly improved their scores, but those in the cognitive and embodied learning groups significantly outperformed the L1 translation group. 句動詞（phrasal verbs）は、数が多く、多...

Studies in Self-Access Learning Journal, 2015

Self-Access Learning Centers (SALCs) have become common at many universities in Japan. They provi... more Self-Access Learning Centers (SALCs) have become common at many universities in Japan. They provide a learning space to actively interact with a foreign language. These centers are self-access and thus promote autonomous learning, so one of the challenges they have to overcome is the difficulty of attracting students to voluntarily enter and participate in such a learning environment. This article reports findings from a study, which examined associations between items on a curiosity scale and students’ exploratory behavior to seek out and participate in activities at the SALC. Implications for foreign language education and suggestions for future research are discussed.

IAFOR Journal of Psychology & the Behavioral Sciences, 2019

Creativity is a multifaceted and complex human trait that allows one to generate and explore unli... more Creativity is a multifaceted and complex human trait that allows one to generate and explore unlimited novel ideas and artifacts. One method to study creativity is to use a creative cognition approach (Finke, Ward, & Smith, 1992; Smith, Ward, Finke, 1995; Ward, Smith, & Finke, 1999), which examines the cognitive processes and structures that lead to the generation of creative ideas. Participants in this study were asked to draw and describe a creature on a distant planet, similar to a prompt used by Ward (1991). Results suggest that the participants relied on what has been termed, structured imagination (Ward, 1994, 1995), or a repertoire of existing knowledge that constrains the production of imaginative ideas. Five responses were then selected for deeper analysis to show how two cognitive processes, conceptual blending (Fauconnier & Turner, 2002) and conceptual expansion, are used to blend and expand known concepts in order to produce a novel idea. This paper discusses implications this research has for theories of creativity and its real world applications, as well as its importance for educational objectives.

The Bloomsbury Companion to Cognitive Linguistics

Japanese university students' interest in taking a Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL... more Japanese university students' interest in taking a Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) course conducted in English was assessed. In addition, a questionnaire was utilized to measure intrinsic motivation, international outlook, and anxiety. An independent sample t-test in SPSS was performed in order to look at how these individual differences differ between the two groups; those who expressed interest and those who did not express interest. Intrinsic motivation and international outlook showed significance with medium to high effect size, while anxiety did not show any significance between the two groups. Participants who showed interest also ranked on a 4-point scale their preference in taking 14 different academic content courses. While participants who did not show interest in taking a CLIL based course provided reasons for this lack of interest. After analyzing their responses, self-efficacy appears to be a pivotal reason for their lack of interest. In the discussion, we address how CLIL needs to become more inclusive rather than exclusively designed to meet the needs of the highly motivated and competent learners. Instructors need to find ways to make CLIL courses more accessible to those who are interested in taking such a course, but lacking belief in their own ability to do so.