Developing and validating instruments for measuring English-as-a-second/Foreign-Language (L2) learners’ metaphor awareness

Type of content
Journal Article
Thesis discipline
Degree name
Publisher
Informa UK Limited
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Language
en
Date
2024
Authors
Ma, Ting
Zhang , Lawrence Jun
Parr , Judy M.
Abstract

Studies have shown that raising L2 learners’ metaphor awareness con tributes to the acquisition of figurative language, which fosters students’ development of language skills. However, the instruments measuring metaphor awareness, in the majority of relevant research, did not seem to have undergone proper methodological procedures for checking their validity and reliability, thus compromising the authenticity of the measurement and challenging the interpretation of the results from the measurement. In addition, both theoretical and empirical research tends to frame metaphoric competence within the territory of linguistic and conceptual metaphors, neglecting the communicative functions of metaphor in discourse. As an attempt to fill these research gaps, our study developed three instruments—two tests and a questionnaire— for measuring metaphor awareness in the linguistic, conceptual, and communicative dimensions. Administered to 293 Chinese undergrad uates at intermediate to advanced English proficiency levels, the instru ments demonstrated good validity and reliability, as checked by Rasch analysis. Results showed that the participants were most aware of the communicative functions of metaphor but found it challenging to iden tify metaphorical prepositions, adverb, and adjectives, and establish the correspondences between the source domain and target domain of conventional conceptual metaphors. We conclude the paper by dis cussing pedagogical implications in relation to L2 metaphor awareness measurement and instruction.

Description
Citation
Ma T, Zhang LJ, Parr JM Developing and validating instruments for measuring English-as-a-second/Foreign-Language (L2) learners’ metaphor awareness. Language Awareness. 1-36.
Keywords
metaphor awareness, instruments development and validation, Rasch analysis, metaphoric competence, L2 learners
Ngā upoko tukutuku/Māori subject headings
ANZSRC fields of research
47 - Language, communication and culture::4704 - Linguistics::470409 - Linguistic structures (incl. phonology, morphology and syntax)
39 - Education::3901 - Curriculum and pedagogy::390108 - LOTE, ESL and TESOL curriculum and pedagogy
Rights
© 2024 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way. The terms on which this article has been published allow the posting of the Accepted Manuscript in a repository by the author(s) or with their consent.