Developing and validating instruments for measuring English-as-a-second/Foreign-Language (L2) learners’ metaphor awareness

Abstract

Studies have shown that raising L2 learners’ metaphor awareness contributes to the acquisition of figurative language, which fosters students’ development of language skills. However, the instruments measuring metaphor awareness, in the majority of relevant research, did not seem to have undergone proper methodological procedures for checking their validity and reliability, thus compromising the authenticity of the measurement and challenging the interpretation of the results from the measurement. In addition, both theoretical and empirical research tends to frame metaphoric competence within the territory of linguistic and conceptual metaphors, neglecting the communicative functions of metaphor in discourse. As an attempt to fill these research gaps, our study developed three instruments—two tests and a questionnaire—for measuring metaphor awareness in the linguistic, conceptual, and communicative dimensions. Administered to 293 Chinese undergraduates at intermediate to advanced English proficiency levels, the instruments demonstrated good validity and reliability, as checked by Rasch analysis. Results showed that the participants were most aware of the communicative functions of metaphor but found it challenging to identify metaphorical prepositions, adverb, and adjectives, and establish the correspondences between the source domain and target domain of conventional conceptual metaphors. We conclude the paper by discussing pedagogical implications in relation to L2 metaphor awareness measurement and instruction.