© 1997 by Oxford University Press
Articles |
Teaching English metaphors using cross-linguistic awareness-raising activities
Lecturer in TESOL in the School of Education, University of Leeds. She has an MA in Applied English Linguistics from the University of Birmingham. She has taught in Spain, Turkey, and the UK, and worked on teacher development programmes in Hong Kong, South America, and the UK. Her research interests include lexis, especially the study of metaphor, and pragmatics.
Lecturer in TEFL and second language acquisition at the Institute of English, University of Silesia, Sosnowiec, Poland, and as a teacher trainer at the Sosnowiec Teacher Training College. She has a PhD in Applied Linguistics from the University of Silesia. Her main interests are in the field of vocabulary acquisition, especially metaphor, L3 language transfer, and research methods in second language acquisition.
Lecturer's assistant at the Institute of English, University of Silesia, Poland. She also teaches pronunciation and linguistics at the Sosnowiec Teacher Training College. She has an MA in Linguistics from the University of Silesia. Her professional interests include pragmatics and figurative language, especially irony and metaphor.
Now that metaphor is recognized as being pervasive in language, it is argued that more attention should be given to the teaching of strategies for comprehending and generating metaphors in L2. In this article we report on a translation exercise undertaken by advanced Polish learners of English which revealed ways in which metaphorical expressions vary between the two languages, and the problems this raises for learners. It is suggested that awareness-raising through discussion and comparison of metaphors in L1 and L2 is a useful approach to help learners to understand and appropriately produce metaphores. This is followed by some sample teaching materials which have been designed to encourage learners to investigate and compare metaphors in L1 and L2.