The main teaching implication of this thesis is that teachers should adapt their metaphor and metonymy instruction to specific communicative tasks since different tasks require different types and amounts of metaphor and metonymy. In other words, rather than searching for one “best approach,” to teaching all metaphor and metonymy, teachers should adopt different approaches for different tasks. Sometimes, this may conflict with teachers’ intuition. For example, traditionally, language teachers who want to teach metaphor in the classroom have focused on creative metaphor in tasks like written narratives or poetry. However, the results of this study show that narrative tasks appear not to require as much metaphor, so it is not as
important for teachers to focus on creative metaphor when teaching them, especially in a general English course. In contrast, some genres and task types, such as the graph description task, appear to require more metaphor than teachers might realize, meaning that teachers might want to focus more on metaphor when teaching these tasks instead.
In this study, narratives (both written and spoken) were found to elicit the smallest amount of metaphor and metonymy from the L2 students. Metaphor and metonymy use as measured by the MIP/MIPVU was found to range from 5.9% - 10.5% on the narrative writing
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task and from 2.3% – 5.9% on the narrative speaking task. In contrast, metaphor and metonymy use as measured by the MIP/MIPVU was found to range from 12.3% to 18.9% on the written summary/responses and from 10.2% - 20.2% on the graph description task. Even for the native speaker samples used for comparison in this study, spoken narratives elicited a metaphor and metonymy frequency of only 4.4% with no creative metaphor use. In fact, most of the language in the narratives was very literal, describing physical things the participants had seen or done. All of this suggests that a more effective approach to teaching metaphor or metonymy for narratives would be to focus on everyday conventional metaphors like idioms or phrasal verbs rather than devote a lot of class time to more creative metaphor use.
In contrast, the summary/response writing task was found to elicit metaphor and
metonymy frequencies of 12.3% - 18.9%, or almost double the metaphor and metonymy use of the narrative writing task. Moreover, the pre-test and post-test articles contained total metaphor and metonymy frequencies of 9% - 17.6%, including a number of idiomatic expressions, culturally opaque phrases, personification, and metonymy that could all be challenging for L2 learners. Furthermore, on the summary/response writing task, conventionalized metaphorical and metonymic expressions taken from news articles accounted for up to 21% of the total metaphor and metonymy used in the ESL students’ writing samples. In other words, to successfully complete this type of task, students need to be able to understand and interpret metaphorical and metonymic expressions in the article as well as use them in their own writing. As a result, metaphor and metonymy instruction focusing on writing effective summary/responses could concentrate on first identifying and understanding metaphor and metonymy in reading passages and then on appropriately transferring expressions to the students’ own writing. In this way, the metaphor and metonymy instruction would be targeting the specific task of writing
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summary/responses rather than representing a general or theoretical approach to teaching metaphor.
In addition, with regard to speaking, the graph description task was found to require more metaphor than the discussion task, which required more metaphor than the narrative task.
Moreover, student narratives were found to contain more similes while the graph description task elicited more personification. Therefore, teachers should consider how much they should focus on metaphor and what kinds of metaphor to target when designing lesson plans since different genres require different types and amounts of metaphor. This also applies to the topic of texts as an academic journal article on the environment will have different types and amounts of
metaphor than an academic journal article on the economy. If teachers are able to target appropriate metaphor use for different fields, genres, and task types, they should be able to develop better lesson plans and materials for targeting metaphoric competence. One example is the graph description task. In this study, it was found that motion verbs, adjectives, and adverbs accounted for up to 29% of the metaphor used in native speaker samples and up to 18% of the metaphor used in the student videos. If teachers focus on these expressions when teaching students how to describe and discuss graphs, students will be able to learn appropriate metaphorical expressions for presenting graphs academically. This shows that by analyzing specific speaking tasks for metaphor and targeting those metaphorical expressions, teachers can create focused lessons for teaching metaphor in an academic context.
A final example is the discussion task. For this task, the topic of the discussion was found to influence the amount of metonymy the students used. That is, questions that contained
metonymy themselves, focused on a political topic, or involved corporations tended to encourage more metonymy use than other discussion questions. This suggests that even within a specific
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communicative task, teachers may want to adjust their instruction to specific topics or subjects. Similarly, on the discussion task, metaphor was used relatively infrequently to structure
arguments by both the students and the native speakers sampled in this study; instead, metaphor was most frequently used in collocations, personification, or more topic-specific phrases and vocabulary. As a result, for some tasks, teachers may want to focus on subject-specific metaphor and metonymy rather than the use of metaphor and metonymy to accomplish a specific
communicative function.
While this section has focused on the need for teachers to tailor metaphor and metonymy instruction to specific communicative tasks, it should be acknowledged that this can be
challenging. First, it can be difficult to find suitable and appropriate authentic material to target metaphor and metonymy for specific task types, genres, and topics. As discussed in the literature review, insufficient coverage of metaphor and metonymy in English language textbooks (Alejo González et al, 2010; Littlemore & Low, 2006a) means teachers who are interested in developing their students’ metaphoric competence must look to sources outside of the textbook for
classroom materials. While this study used newspaper articles and TED talks as authentic sources of everyday metaphorical expressions like phrasal verbs, collocational patterns,
idiomatic expressions, and personification, it is not always easy to find an appropriate reading or listening source for students’ English proficiency level. In addition, although it is a good idea to choose articles or videos with the same genre and topic as students’ productive tasks so that these sources can serve both as language input and as a model of appropriate metaphor use for when students perform the task on their own, it can be difficult to find appropriate reading and listening sources for each genre and task type. For example, if a teacher wants their students to have a discussion on climate change, rather than just find an academic lecture or an educational
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video explaining climate change, the instructor might want to look for an informal discussion among native speakers that includes both task and topic specific metaphorical language. However, debates on news programs tend to feature speakers heatedly shouting at one another while formal debates among scientists might be above the level of a general English class. In other words, finding appropriate reading and listening source materials can be a daunting task for teachers who want to incorporate more metaphor and metonymy instruction targeting specific communicative tasks into their language classes.
Another problem is a lack of information. As little research has been conducted on the relationship between how different tasks affect how much and what kind of metaphor and
metonymy is used, language teachers simply may not know how to tailor metaphor instruction to specific communicative tasks. This was the case in this study, as written and spoken narratives were originally chosen for instruction since it was believed that they would necessitate creative metaphor use. Another example from the discussion task is class instruction on using metaphor to structure arguments. It was later found that using metaphor to structure arguments was not actually as prevalent or necessary for discussion tasks as initially believed. Moreover, teachers do not receive training on how to teach metaphor and metonymy and may not be familiar with cognitive linguistics concepts, principles, or research themselves. More research, especially if it is incorporated directly into language textbooks, could help teachers close this gap. In the meantime, a lack of data, training, and materials makes it difficult for teachers to incorporate task-specific metaphor instruction into the language curriculum.