Seeing through Metaphor: Teaching Figurative Literacy (original) (raw)

The Importance of teaching ‘Metaphors’ in the Educational System

The Fountain Magazine, 2014

Most people have a knowledge of what metaphor is about. Some have encountered them in poetry and literature and most of us take advantage of this figurative language during a conversation. According to Gibbs (1994), a study revealed that people in ordinary discourse make use of 1.08 novel and 4.08 “frozen metaphors” per minute during a conversation. John Lakoff and Mark Johnson published a book on “Metaphors we live by” in the 1980. The theory argues that metaphors are abundant in language due to the fact that they portray metaphorical thoughts. The idea is provided from Lakoff and Johnson’s book; “Metaphors as linguistic expressions are possible precisely because there are metaphors in a person’s conceptual system” (Lakoff and Johnson 2003: 6).A conceptual metaphor exists in the mind of the speaker thus it may be unconscious.

METAPHORIC COMPETENCE AS A MEANS TO META-COGNITIVE AWARENESS IN FIRST-YEAR COMPOSITION

A growing body of writing research suggests college students' and teachers' conceptualizations of writing play an important role in learning to write and making the transition from secondary to post-secondary academic composition. First-year college writers are not blank slates; rather, they bring many assumptions and beliefs about academic writing to the first-year writing classroom from exposure to a wide range of literate practices throughout their lives. Metaphor acts as a way for scholars to trace students' as well as their instructors'

Meanings and metaphors: activities to practise figurative language

2003

Thanks and Acknowledgements v Map of the book vi 14 As free as a bird: Common similes 51 15 Marketing your metaphors: Advertising 54 16 A bird in the hand: Proverbs 58 17 Mix me a metaphor: Poems 62 18 Selling with similes: Inventing similes 65 19 Shedding light on the matter: Light and dark 69 20 Plain sailing: Games and sports 72 21 Rising to the top: 'Up' and 'down' 75 22 Infectious laughter: Health and illness 79 23 Facing up to it: Parts of the body 82 24 Horsing around: Animals 85 25 Food for thought: Cooking and food 89 26 In a nutshell: Origins of idioms 93 27 Keeping your cool: Temperature 97 28 Rough diamonds: Describing people 101 29 Persuasion: Advertising 105 30 Breezing through: Weather 109 31 Pictures in the mind: Descriptive writing 113 32 Ripples and sparks: Water and fire 116 33 Learning is juggling: Analogies 120

Students’ and Lecturers’ Perspectives on the Factors Influencing One’s Metaphor Competence

2013

This article aimed to see the perspective of lecturers and students regarding the factors influencing people's metaphor competence in daily life. Twenty-one students were interviewed and ten lecturers were sent a questionnaire asking about the factors that might influence the use of metaphors. The results show that both lecturers and students agree that language mastery is not the only one which determines the ability of people in comprehending and producing metaphors. Other non-linguistic factors such as habits, environment, personality, social network, logical thinking and general knowledge also influence people. The respondents propose that metaphors are to be taught to students not only in language subjects but also in other subjects such as Character Building or other social subjects.

Metaphorical Vocabulary in English as a Medium of Instruction Courses

JALT 2021 Post-Conference Publication, 2022

English as a Medium of Instruction (EMI) programs are growing in popularity in Japanese universities. Accordingly, there is a need to examine the linguistic demands of EMI instruction. The value of lexical knowledge is well known, but there is also growing recognition of the importance of metaphor in expressing abstract concepts in academic disciplines. Lack of metaphor awareness is known to affect learner comprehension, but no systematic studies of metaphor in Japanese university EMI courses have yet been conducted. This study used a two- million-word corpus of EMI course materials to identify common metaphors used to describe key concepts in applied linguistics, literature, philosophy, and political science. The findings confirm that metaphor is frequently used in EMI instruction. Results suggest that in applied linguistics, philosophy, and political science 10 to 25% of metaphor use can be accounted for by 9 to 12 conceptual metaphors, while literature appears to draw on a wider range of source terms.

1. The Creative Power of Metaphor

Creative Multilingualism

Chapter 1 looks at processes of figurative language in the interplay between thought and language from the vantage point of cognitive linguistics, exploring how different languages give their speakers different perspectives on the world through the way metaphors shape even the most fundamental concepts, such as time.

Literature review of three journals on metaphor

With advances in science and technology, creative thinking and language proficiency are urgent needed in English as a Foreign Language (EFL) teaching and learning. However, in some universities, language skills training stress the imitation, while ignores students’ thinking ability, innovation ability, the ability to analyze the problems and put forward individual opinion. In George Lakoff and Mark Johnson’s (1980) Metaphor We Live By, metaphor is not simply a matter of word or linguistic expressions, but of concept, of thinking of one thing in terms of another. As a ubiquitous phenomenon in language, Metaphor is the motive power of the language system’s development and change, and a leading way to close the gap between the old and new knowledge of students. The use of conceptual metaphor teaching method in EFL class can enhance the students’ abilities of metaphor input and output, that is, the effects on vocabulary, reading and writing abilities. Besides, metaphor can provide insights into complex concepts of teaching and thus provide a window into the comprehension of teachers’ personal experiences. Although the significance of metaphor in EFL teaching and learning have been recognized by most scholars, metaphor is still paid no or little attention to be adopted in EFL class and treated as a merely rhetorical device. So how to apply metaphor enriched teaching and learning approaches in EFL class to cultivate the students’ critical thinking and conceptual fluency has great significance.