Fostering Figurative Thinking Through Motivated Vocabulary Instruction: A Case Study in Northern Kazakhstan

Abstract

In the contemporary educational setting, foreign language acquisition is increasingly viewed as a driver of cognitive and creative development. An essential component of this process is figurative thinking, that is, the capacity to establish metaphorical and associative links between diverse phenomena. Although theoretical research on lexical motivation and conceptual imagery is extensive, the systematic integration of these frameworks into school-level English Language Teaching (ELT) remains underexplored, particularly within bilingual settings. This study sets out the methodological foundations for fostering figurative thinking and develops an instructional system of exercises designed to strengthen the associative-figurative interpretation of metaphorically motivated lexis among school students. The research used a psycholinguistic experiment and a pedagogical intervention with a pretest-posttest design. The study included bilingual and monolingual students (N = 64). The experimental group (N = 32) completed a six-stage instructional program centered on the "inner form" of English words, while statistical significance was tested using Independent and Paired Samples t-tests, Cohen’s d, and Pearson correlation analysis. Baseline assessments showed a statistically significant advantage for bilinguals in perceiving the inner form of words (p = 0.004, d = 1.49). After the intervention, the experimental group showed a substantial increase across all figurative-thinking indicators, with the largest growth in motivational reflection (Δ = +1.9, p < 0.01, d = 1.60). Correlation analysis revealed a strong positive relationship (r = 0.68, p < 0.01) between awareness of a word's inner form and the creative quality of metalinguistic utterances. The findings support the efficacy of the motivological approach in ELT. The results indicate that systematic work with motivated vocabulary not only expands the lexicon but also reshapes cognitive interpretative strategies, strengthening metalinguistic reflection and cognitive flexibility in bilingual educational contexts.