Using Metaphor in Educational Discourse

Metaphor analysis in education reflects the implicit intentions of teachers, their real attitude to education, and their desire to express their ideas figuratively and not clearly. The present study is interested in assessing how metaphor are used in classrooms, how students learn to understand metaphors in learning and understanding concepts. Analysis of metaphors in two types of natural language data are combined: detailed analysis of continuous discourse, which offers wealth of context and the possibility of monitoring emergent forms as the discourse unfolds, and computer-assisted corpus analysis, which enables the examination of large numbers of examples of specific words and phrases across a range of contexts. It shows a way to distinguish cognitive metaphor emerging in the course of a discourse event and another which appears to have emerged recently as a result of a changing social environment.

Keywords:

Metaphor , educational discourse , textbooks , classrooms , teachers.