The objective of this study is to investigate an alternative pedagogy to teach motion deixis in a FL environment such as Taiwan. The study examined two deictic verbs bring and take by recruiting approximately 40 freshmen from a university in Northern Taiwan for a comparative experiment. They were divided into two groups, with one group, the control group, instructed with traditional teaching method, namely, the Grammar-Translation Method (GTM), while the other, the experimental group, with the Cognitive Instruction (CI) approach. Each group received six sessions of respective treatment, and a pretest prior to and a posttest after the treatment were administered to gauge participants’ performance. Moreover, the delayed posttest was conducted to investigate participants’ retention. Results indicate that CI group not only made considerable improvement, it also outperformed the GTM group significantly. GTM group, in fact, showed regression instead of progress after treatment. Such results support our hypothesis that context-free, sentence-level instruction, which makes up most of the GTM, could not fulfill the need of mastering some aspects of language learning, particularly those of deixis learning. Instead, our study underlines the urgency for FL teachers to have the knowledge of language from a cognitive perspective when the language focus is highly context-dependent in order to facilitate effective learning.