‘The Genome Is the Brain of the Cell!’ How Japanese English Learners Mediate Understanding of Academic Content through Metaphor

IF 2.2 3区 文学 0 LANGUAGE & LINGUISTICS Metaphor and Symbol Pub Date : 2023-01-02 DOI:10.1080/10926488.2022.2091444
Dennis Lindenberg
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Abstract

ABSTRACT This study investigates metaphor in its role to mediate concepts in academic textbooks and promote content understanding in the English-medium instruction (EMI) context. Of particular interest is how the language of the discourse affected and possibly hindered metaphor comprehension. Drawing on the theoretical insights found in sociocultural theory and cognitive linguistics, a stance was assumed in which language is treated as embodied and contextual, and verbalizing thoughts (languaging) assists understanding. Three pairs of Japanese students with varying English proficiency levels were invited to participate in online group-based think-aloud protocols where they read and discussed selected paragraphs taken from two social and two natural science textbooks written in English. After accessing the participants’ general knowledge about the main topic of each paragraph, content understanding was accounted for in form of prompts during the think-aloud sessions and a 3-week delayed posttest. In total, over 8 hours of video data were collected, transcribed, and treated with the metaphor identification procedure MIPVU. Qualitative inspections of charged moments in discourse pinpoint metaphor as an important tool for compressing abstract entities or processes into meaningful, dense bundles of information. Participants also created their own analogies and expanded on found metaphoric expressions in textbooks when attempting to make sense of abstract phenomena in science. Further, this study confirms that the lack of English proficiency or schematic knowledge can result in non-understanding, misunderstanding, or partial understanding of metaphoric expressions which has implications for the EMI context.
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“基因组是细胞的大脑!”日本英语学习者如何通过隐喻介导对学术内容的理解
摘要本研究探讨了隐喻在英语教学中对教科书概念的中介作用,以及促进内容理解的作用。特别令人感兴趣的是,语篇的语言是如何影响和可能阻碍隐喻理解的。根据社会文化理论和认知语言学中的理论见解,人们认为语言被视为具体的和语境的,语言化的思想(语言化)有助于理解。三对英语水平不同的日本学生被邀请参加基于在线小组的大声思考协议,他们在协议中阅读和讨论从两本英语社会和两本自然科学教科书中选取的段落。在了解了参与者关于每一段主要主题的一般知识后,在大声思考和3周延迟后测期间,以提示的形式解释内容理解。总共收集、转录了超过8小时的视频数据,并使用隐喻识别程序MIPVU进行处理。对语篇中带电矩的定性检查将隐喻定位为将抽象实体或过程压缩成有意义、密集的信息束的重要工具。参与者在试图理解科学中的抽象现象时,还创建了自己的类比,并扩展了教科书中发现的隐喻表达。此外,本研究证实,缺乏英语能力或图式知识会导致对隐喻表达的不理解、误解或部分理解,这对EMI上下文有影响。
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来源期刊
CiteScore
2.90
自引率
0.00%
发文量
23
期刊介绍: Metaphor and Symbol: A Quarterly Journal is an innovative, multidisciplinary journal dedicated to the study of metaphor and other figurative devices in language (e.g., metonymy, irony) and other expressive forms (e.g., gesture and bodily actions, artworks, music, multimodal media). The journal is interested in original, empirical, and theoretical research that incorporates psychological experimental studies, linguistic and corpus linguistic studies, cross-cultural/linguistic comparisons, computational modeling, philosophical analyzes, and literary/artistic interpretations. A common theme connecting published work in the journal is the examination of the interface of figurative language and expression with cognitive, bodily, and cultural experience; hence, the journal''s international editorial board is composed of scholars and experts in the fields of psychology, linguistics, philosophy, computer science, literature, and media studies.
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