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Part of
Language, Culture and Identity – Signs of Life
Edited by Vera da Silva Sinha, Ana Moreno-Núñez and Zhen Tian
[Cognitive Linguistic Studies in Cultural Contexts 13] 2020
► pp. 111–140

Chapter 6
A framing-based account of critical cultural awareness

| China Foreign Affairs University

In this chapter, I investigate cognitive processes and stages in the development of critical cultural awareness on the basis of frame semantics and conceptual blending theory. Twelve Chinese MA students from four universities in Beijing participated in an experiment. During the experiment, the participants read the English article “Body Ritual among the Esenihc”, performed tasks of Think-Aloud protocol and picture selection, and answered questions. The data were analyzed with Voyant Tools and thematic coding. The results suggest that critical cultural awareness development involves the processes of automatic framing, deframing, reframing, and blending and that it goes through the stages of framing absolutivity, framing flexibility, framing plurality, and framing relativity. I propose a model for critical cultural awareness development to represent these findings.

Keywords: critical cultural awareness, framing, frame semantics, conceptual blending theory
Article outline
  • Introduction
  • Frame semantics and conceptual blending theory
  • Experiment
    • Participants
    • Materials
    • Tasks and procedure
  • Analysis and results
    • Think-Aloud protocols
    • Picture choices
    • Responses to verbal probing tasks
    • Responses to verbal probing task 1
    • Responses to verbal probing task 2
    • Responses to verbal probing task 3
    • Responses to verbal probing task 4
    • Responses to verbal probing task 5
  • Discussion
    • Automatic framing and framing absolutivity
    • Deframing and framing flexibility
    • Reframing and framing plurality
    • Blending and framing relativity
    • A framing-based model for CCA development
    • Limitations of the study
  • Conclusions
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 30 April 2020
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/clscc.13.06he
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