Conceptual Fluency in Second Language Teaching: An Overview of Problems, Issues, Research Findings, and Pedagogy

Conceptual Fluency (CF) and the related notion of metaphorical competence (MC) emerged in the mid-1980s as a pedagogical response to the research findings and insights that were crystallizing in the fledgling field at the time of cognitive linguistics, and specifically, of conceptual metaphor theory. Since then, a considerable amount of work has been conducted on these notions investigating their main premises, researching their efficacy as teaching-learning tools, and exploring their pedagogical implications. Over three decades later, this paper presents an overview of the relevant work and raises the questions and issues that these notions continue to raise.