Researching cultural models in the metaphors and metonyms of Ugandan children’s essays

Abstract

Children's culture is illuminated by the analysis of school-children's essays to reveal cultural models and core constructs pertaining to high-stakes examinations. Using a corpus of essays written for the Ugandan Primary Leaving Examination (PLE) in 1995, we explicate a series of related analytical processes that distinguish key themes and linguistic structures, survey the range of semantic variations in these structures, examine the cognitive postures and cultural frames that these structures present, and identify cultural models and core constructs that underlie the culture-wide perceptions of these schoolchildren. In the PLE essays, two master tropes, Uganda-as-a-nation and examination fever, function in dynamically opposite directions of inclusion and dissonance for children. Using these tropes, the children present contrasting pictures of their own responsibility, ability, or inability to control exam outcomes and their own future, and to participate in a modern life in a successful nation or to return to their impoverished village.