L’enseignement des langues et le sens ‘non littéral’ des signes

Abstract

Listen

Translate article

Traditionally, figurative language in general and metaphor in particular have been considered a deviation from literal language or a marginal phenomenon. This is probably one of the reasons why metaphor is absent from second language teaching manuals. This absence seems also to be justified by the few studies done on nonnative speakers on this topic. Researchers suggest that figurative language is more difficult for L2 learners because of their tendency to avoid in the L2 marked items and structures of their native language. Nevertheless, in her study of comprehension and recall of figurative speech by L2 learners, Biava (1991) pointed out that there was no statistically significant difference between literal and figurative items. This corresponds to a new conception of metaphor and supports a decade of findings in psycholinguistic research: On the one hand, experimental evidence suggests that figurative speech does not require special cognitive processes to be understood, on the other hand it is not the special privilege of a few gifted speakers but it plays a central role not only in both written and spoken discourse but also in thought (Lakoff and Johnson 1980). In this article, the hypothesis will be tested that non advanced learners should be able to unterstand figurative speech independent of their age. This hypothesis relies on the consideration that a metaphoric competency in the L2 depends more on capacity and conceptual-knowledge variables than on language-specific proficiency, as Johnson (1989) points out for her bilingual children. The aim is to find out whether the avoidance of this phenomenon by L2 learners is due to the problems metaphor comprehension causes to them or to the low 'input frequency' in classroom, since it seems that learners come across metaphors very rarely