Helping Foreign Language Learners to Make Sense of Literature with Metaphor Awareness-raising

Abstract

EFL students of English literature face the substantial challenge of making sense of literary texts written in a foreign language. EFL teachers working with these students need to understand the problems that they face and develop ways of helping them to overcome them. This article focuses on metaphor in literature and on whether awareness raising work related to conceptual metaphors (CMs) helps EFL students to make sense of the linguistic metaphors that they encounter in literature. In particular, the research focuses on making sense of ‘invisible’ metaphors – linguistic metaphors that are comparatively difficult to identify in context. Three studies involving students in a department of English in Japan are presented. The studies provide evidence that CM awareness-raising increases the likelihood that metaphorical readings of invisible metaphors will occur, both in the short and in the longer term. However, one of the studies also shows that CM awareness-raising can be a source of confusion due to the fact that different CMs may share the same source domain. Thus, Life Is A Journey and Love Is A Journey share the source domain Journey, and this can cause confusion when students encounter a Journey-related metaphor in a literary text.