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Twenty-seven semi-guided conversations between lecturers and Spanish-speaking undergraduate students were recorded at five different universities in Europe where English is the medium of instruction. Examination of the metaphorical language used in these conversations revealed that SIGHT plays an important role in academic mentoring in English. Lecturers often frame their advice to undergraduate students in terms of what has been called "UNDERSTANDING IS SEEING," on the face of it a somewhat unsurprising finding. If one takes it that the correlation between mental and visual activity is somehow "primary" (Grady, 1997;Lakoff & Johnson, 1999;Sweetser, 1991) then this way of reasoning about learning and knowledge should be common ground in conversations between English-and Spanish-speaking interlocutors. However, we found no such alignment between the two groups of participants in an academic setting. The Spanish speakers not only used words and terms associated with vision significantly less frequently than their English-speaking interlocutors, but also with different meanings. We explore these quantitative and qualitative differences in metaphorical uses of three of the terms used by all participants to talk about learning-see, look and focus-and conclude that, although the "UNDERSTANDING IS SEEING" mapping might be available as a way of reasoning about learning and knowledge to people from different cultures, discourse practices influences how salient it is for different groups of speakers. In this regard, it appears to be culturally salient for English-speaking academics, but not necessarily so for speakers of other languages.

Although quite a lot is known about the way that non-native speakers of English may interpret and produce metaphors in their second language, we know little about metaphor use in face-to-face conversation between primary and secondary speakers of English. In this article we explore the use of metaphors in two types of conversational data: one elicited in a semi-structured interview format, the other consisting of naturally occurring conversations involving one non-native speaker in dialogue with various native speakers. We found that although native speakers’ use of metaphor was occasionally problematic for the interaction, metaphor also afforded opportunities for topic development in these conversations. The repetition of a word with the potential for metaphoric extension was a particularly valuable strategy used by non-native speakers in these conversations in constructing their coherent contributions to the discourse. In contrast, the use of phraseological metaphors (often the focus of activities aimed at fostering second language learners’ mastery of conventional English metaphors) did not contribute to the joint construction of meanings in these circumstances. We discuss the role of high frequency vocabulary in these conversations and some implications for further research.

Twenty-seven semi-guided office hours’ consultations between lecturers and Spanish-speaking undergraduate students were recorded at five different universities in Europe where English is the medium of instruction. The linguistic data gathered show that metaphor plays a significant role in the way that lecturers explain to visiting Erasmus students how assignments, exams or course contents should be approached and understood. When mentoring their students, lecturers often frame the advice they are giving in metaphorical ways; occasionally this is done overtly, through establishing analogies or non-literal comparisons, but more often it is done covertly, through the use of conventional metaphorical expressions that are not accompanied by words or phrases that signal that the lecturers’ words should be understood as metaphors. This article examines extracts of talk from 5 academic conversations, looking at the different ways that ideas are framed metaphorically and the kind of responses they provoke in a conversational partner. The initial hypothesis was that overt metaphors would be a particularly effective means of communicating an idea in these crosscultural mentoring sessions. However, when we compare this with covert uses of metaphor in the corpus, there is only weak evidence that it is so. Rather, the communicative success of any use of metaphor seems to depend very largely on the way that the conversational partners enact their roles as collaborative participants in an academic conversation.

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