Virtual and augmented reality as an antonymy learning innovation

Abstract

The more we know about children mental lexicon organization, the more effective our pedagogical practices may be, which emphasizes the importance of a truly comprehensive connection between Research and Education. We will be conducting a three-step paper beginning with a brief summary of lexical semantic relations, mainly of antonymy, secondly we will explain how the project “Língua e Cidadania: das relações entre palavras ao conhecimento do mundo”/Language and citizenship: from the words relations to the world knowledge (Baptista et al., 2018) was held and how its experiments allowed to verify if primary school pupils intuitively organize their mental lexicon in a dichotomous way, mainly with comprehension and organization of narrative words in three narratives and thirdly we will explain that different strategies used for grouping words may correspond to different ways of organizing the mental lexicon and defend that language teaching should take this idea into consideration. We found very useful to propose an augmented reality application. 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.