Metaphorical Competence in ESL Student Writing

Abstract

In language teaching, emphasis is usually placed on grammatical competence rather than metaphorical competence to improve a learner’s proficiency in the target language. Research has shown that figurative language poses a problem for second language learners whether it is in their ability to interpret, process, or produce metaphors. This affects communication as metaphors are not only restricted to formal texts but are a common feature of everyday language through which individual’s conceptualize and describe the world. To gauge students’ metaphorical competence, this paper aims to analyze student writing to identify the type of problems second language writers have with collocations and to convince teachers of the importance of promoting the development of metaphoric language among language learners. The findings revealed that although students attempt to use a range of metaphors such as grammatical, textual, illocutionary, and sociolinguistic in their writing, these tend to be unidiomatic and need to be developed further for fluency in the target language.

Learning Portuguese as a Second Language

“…With regard to the type of tests examined to ascertain the influence of nationality, the school covariate also shows that they are verbal reasoning tests but with the rhetorical language domain that is vital for communication skills, like some authors (Kathpalia & Carmel, 2011;Littlemore & Low, 2006) previously noted when assessing the difficulty of L2 learners who have been neglected by teachers and researchers. They are more complex tests and phonological awareness is not evident among the items that showed the importance of nationality as a performance differentiating variable, unlike what was observed for the direct effect of L1 when it showed to be influential.…”

Atoms Misbehaving: Assessing University Students' Comprehension of English Metaphor in Engineering Textbooks.

“…In addition to previous comments about students producing metaphors that were sometimes unnatural, she notes that instructors should be aware of metaphors used in metalanguage used to provide verbal feedback. Kathpalia and Carmel (2011) found similar results to MacArthur. They looked at a corpus of writing samples from first-year Science & Arts university students in Singapore to analyze types of figurative language problems in the English as a lingua franca context.…”

“…She explains that students do not always have an understanding of the motivation for metaphoric words and expressions, their origins or referents, and as a result the ways in which particular words can be used. Kathpalia and Carmel (2011) also investigated the domain of writing, and found that although students tried to incorporate metaphor, it often proved to be unidiomatic or unnatural (not native-like). In Littlemore's 2001 (c) listening comprehension study previously mentioned, she discovered that EAL students had difficulty recognizing figurative language, as well as correctly interpreting the meaning of some English metaphors.…”

“…In summary, despite all of the research demonstrating the benefits of metaphoric competence and the difficulties EAL learners have achieving it, it is not consistently or systematically taught in EAL classrooms (Kathpalia & Carmel, 2011). Metaphor comprehension is still not seen as a core competency that should be taught or tested (Littlemore & Low, 2006).…”

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“…Furthermore, Nacey (2013) manifested the challenges in using novel metaphor, of which non-native speakers faced was mostly the language error. Furthermore, according to Kathpalia and Carmel (2011), cross-cultural competence has an effect on metaphor competence. The misunderstanding in inter-cultural communication causes inaccurate interpretation toward the metaphors in their writing.…”