The Cloze Response Patterns of L1 and L2 Students to Literal and Idiomatic Text

Abstract

A lack of background knowledge has been shown to contribute to the difficulty ESL students have in comprehending text. An important part of background knowledge is an understanding of metaphor. The study measured the effects of metaphor on ESL adults' reading comprehension. Two passages were selected that were comparable in difficulty; one containing many idiomatic items, the other containing only literal language. The passages were made into cIoze passages and were administered to randomly selected native English speaking university students and adult ESL students. The university students scored significantly higher on both the literal and idiomatic passages than the ESL students. The ESL students scored significantly higher on the literal passage than they did on the idiomatic passage while the university students scored significantly higher on the idiomatic passage than the literal passage. Idiomatic language resulted in lower comprehension for the ESL students while it increased the English speakers' scores. It was concluded that since the vehicles of many metaphors have become lost and are not retrievable from surface structure, it may be necessary to teach metaphors as vocabulary items. Further research into the methodology of teaching metaphor is called for.

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

“…One other student who provided a literal response did not submit the accompanying questionnaire to the SAFE test; the first language is unknown. EAL students making literal interpretations of the metaphoric language is consistent with Danesi's (1995, p. 4) "textbook literalness" classification and the results of Gunderson, Slade and Rosenke's (1988) study.…”

“…However, few studies exist in this area, particularly in the postsecondary context (e.g. Boers, 2000;Gunderson, Slade & Rosenke, 1988). As such, a discussion of metaphor studies in other language skill domains (i.e.…”

“…Students were able to make the jump from literal to figurative when given a glossary of the literal sense of the test metaphoric phrases and were a little better at retaining the meanings a few days after the initial reading comprehension test. In another study, Gunderson, Slade and Rosenke (1988) Two studies examine metaphors in textbooks. Skorczynska Sznajder's (2010) study investigated which metaphors to focus on in EAL teaching by comparing metaphors in an English business textbook to those in a corpus of business periodicals and journals, but found very little overlap.…”

Metaphor Comprehension and Engineering texts: Implications for English for Academic Purpose (EAP) and First-year University Student Success

“…Metaphoric competence is a difficult concept to define (e.g., O'Reilly & Marsden, 2020); however, Littlemore's (2001a) definition provided some insights: "the ability to acquire, produce, and interpret metaphors in the target language" (p. 459). Existing literature demonstrates the benefits for English L2 students of developing metaphoric competence (e.g., Hoang, 2014;Littlemore, 2001a;Low, 1988) and the difficulties they have in recognizing, correctly interpreting, and producing metaphors in English (e.g., Danesi, 1995;Gunderson et al, 1988;Kathpalia & Carmel, 2011;Littlemore, 2001b). However, with a few notable exceptions (e.g., Duff et al, 2015;Ferreira, 2020;Ferreira & Zappa-Hollman, 2019), metaphor comprehension is often conspicuously absent from English as a second/ additional language (ESL/EAL) and EAP curricula (Littlemore & Low, 2006).…”