Using Multimodal Extended Metaphor Prompts to Induce the Production of Figurative Language in Low-Intermediate Japanese Learners of English
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USING MULTIMODAL EXTENDED METAPHOR PROMPTS TO INDUCE THE PRODUCTION OF FIGURATIVE LANGUAGE IN LOW-INTERMEDIATE JAPANESE LEARNERS OF ENGLISH by JOSEPH GEORGE TOMEI A thesis submitted to the University of Birmingham for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Department of English Language and Applied Linguistics School of English, Drama, and American & Canadian Studies College of Arts and Law The University of Birmingham October 2017 University of Birmingham Research Archive e-theses repository This unpublished thesis/dissertation is copyright of the author and/or third parties. The intellectual property rights of the author or third parties in respect of this work are as defined by The Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988 or as modified by any successor legislation. Any use made of information contained in this thesis/dissertation must be in accordance with that legislation and must be properly acknowledged. Further distribution or reproduction in any format is prohibited without the permission of the copyright holder. Abstract It has been over 35 years since the publication of Reddy's 1979 study of the metaphors for communication, an article that could be said to mark the starting point of Conceptual Metaphor Theory. However, despite the understanding that metaphor and figurative language are fundamental to language, in that time there has been little progress in introducing metaphor into the L2 classroom, especially at lower levels. This thesis argues that learners at this level have figurative resources that have not yet been acknowledged, but could be key elements in developing an L2 metaphor pedagogy. To explore this possibility, a mixed methods investigation of the effect of mutimodal writing prompts based on extended metaphors was conducted with two cohorts of low-intermediate Japanese university students. The mixed methods data analysis revealed not only that the presentation of one extended metaphor could 'activate' metaphorical knowledge of other extended metaphors and induce the production of metaphoric language, but that multimodal material provides an as yet unexploited resource for an L2 metaphor pedagogy. Dedication This thesis is dedicated to the three women in my life, my wife Miho, and my two daughters, Tabatha and Lana. Acknowledgements In keeping with the idea of distributed cognition, it should be realized that rather than the conceit that these ideas sprang from my own head, the pieces of this thesis come from different people in different places. First and foremost, I would like to thank my PhD advisor, Jeannette Littlemore. She not only put up with the marked attrition of my first language skills, without her direction and knowledge and energy, this thesis would not have happened. This thesis benefited from presentations at the Fukuoka Cognitive Linguistics Circle and the Nagasaki chapter of JALT. A special thank you to Makoto Yoshii, Haruhiko Murao and Rick Lavin at the Prefectural University of Kumamoto for letting me conduct my research there and the two cohorts of students who were the participants and agreed to let me use their work in class. I'm also indebted to Rick for his close reading of my thesis. Also proofreading this thesis was Melodie Cook, who kept me on the straight and grammatically narrow. Table of Contents Chapter One: Prologue 1.0 Introduction .......................................................................................................................................................... 1 Chapter Two: A Contextual Review of Conceptual Metaphor Research 2.0 Introduction .......................................................................................................................................................... 11 2.1 The feature/attribute selection view of metaphor ................................................................................................. 11 2.2 Conceptual Metaphor Theory: Setting the stage ................................................................................................. 16 2.3 The development of Conceptual Metaphor Theory .............................................................................................. 19 2.4 Conceptual Metaphor Theory: LIFE IS A JOURNEY ........................................................................................... 27 2.5 Real data, Discourse Analysis and CMT ............................................................................................................. 34 2.6 Categorising metaphors ....................................................................................................................................... 41 2.7 Metaphors outside language: 4E and distributed cognition ................................................................................. 45 Chapter Three: Is there such a thing as L2 metaphoric competence and if so, what is it? 3.0 Introduction .......................................................................................................................................................... 52 3.1 Metaphoric competence, interlanguage and the L2 speaker ............................................................................... 54 3.1.1 Beginnings .................................................................................................................................................. 56 3.1.2 Metaphoric competence as a set of psychological skills ............................................................................ 58 3.1.3 Metaphoric competence incorporated into communicative competence .................................................... 62 3.1.3.1 Azuma's Test of Metaphoric Competence ......................................................................................... 64 3.1.3.2 Metaphoric competence versus grammatical accuracy ..................................................................... 72 3.1.4 Metaphoric competence as a practice-based approach ............................................................................. 75 3.1.5 Metaphoric competence in production ........................................................................................................ 77 3.1.5.1 Coupling reception and production .................................................................................................... 78 3.1.5.2 Production out of the shadows (MacArthur, 2010) ............................................................................ 82 3.1.5.3 Large-scale corpora comparisons (Nacey, 2013; Turner, 2014; Littlemore, et al., 2014) ................. 83 3.1.5.4 Metaphor Teaching Interventions (Bennett, 2017) ............................................................................ 86 3.2 Dealing with longer texts (Kathpalia and Carmel, 2011) ...................................................................................... 89 3.3 Kachru and the circles of English (Kachru, 1992) ................................................................................................ 92 3.4 L2 metaphor pedagogy ........................................................................................................................................ 96 Chapter Four: The Japanese learner 4.0 Introduction .......................................................................................................................................................... 104 4.1 L1 writing instruction in Japan .............................................................................................................................. 108 4.2 Identifying lacunae in writing instruction .............................................................................................................. 110 4.3 L2 writing research examined in the context of the Japanese learner of English ................................................ 112 4.4 The pedagogical impact of English in Japan ....................................................................................................... 117 Chapter Five: Metaphor in Japanese, Vygotskian theory and multimodality 5.0 Introduction .......................................................................................................................................................... 121 5.1 The Japanese Linguistic Landscape .................................................................................................................... 122 5.2 English as part of a multi-lingual mix: an example ............................................................................................... 125 5.3 Metaphor in Japanese ......................................................................................................................................... 128 5.3.1 Different paths to lexical knowledge ........................................................................................................... 132 5.3.2 Gairaigo and wasei-eigo ............................................................................................................................. 134 5.3.3 Figurative language and Japanese borrowings .......................................................................................... 136 5.4 Constructivism, Piaget and Vygotsky and EFL .................................................................................................... 139 5.4.1 Piaget: Cognitive constructivism ................................................................................................................. 142 5.4.2 Vygotsky: Sociocultural constructivism ......................................................................................................