Metaphor in the Curriculum

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This project emerges from a need, identified during the AHRC-funded 'Mapping Metaphor with the Historical Thesaurus' project, for educational resources on metaphor in English targeting secondary school learners and teachers. In the final stages of that project, the team worked closely with a group of school teachers and other education professionals to establish the form that materials should take to best address learners' needs.The main public output of Mapping Metaphor is a 'Metaphor Map', which shows through an interactive visualisation what the vocabulary of English reveals about the metaphorical connections that speakers and writers have made between semantic areas over the entire history of English (from Anglo-Saxon times to the present, a period of thirteen centuries). Recent research in linguistics has firmly established that underlying the metaphors visible in text and speech (e.g. linguistic expressions like 'He gave me the cold shoulder', 'Small dogs have fiery temperaments', 'She was burning with embarrassment') are so-called 'conceptual metaphors', systematic connections between distinct areas of meaning (all three examples above instantiating the metaphor EMOTION IS HEAT). The Metaphor Map has a dynamic web-based interface that enables users to explore metaphors at different levels of specificity. A top-level view shows metaphor connections between 37 generic-level categories (e.g. The World, Animals, Physical sensation, Mental capacity). A drill-down view shows connections between c.400 readily-understood, basic-level categories (e.g. Atmosphere and weather, Reptiles, Taste, Imagination). Users click to view 'Metaphor cards' which display further details, including example words, date information and direction of transfer. The Map also links directly to specific entries in the Historical Thesaurus of English (HT), allowing users to move seamlessly between the resources. The HT (http://historicalthesaurus.arts.gla.ac.uk/) contains 793,742 word forms and provides the Map's source data: the HT draws on the complete 2nd edn of the Oxford English Dictionary and, for the period c.700-1150 AD, A Thesaurus of Old English (Roberts & Kay 1995). The metaphorical connections displayed in the Map have been identified by the Mapping Metaphor project team through a labour-intensive and entirely bottom-up, evidence-driven methodology. We have identified c.20,000 connections between semantic categories, which underlie many tens of thousands of lexical items with metaphorical senses. The aim of the follow-on project is to create resources for use by teachers and learners of English Language and Literature at secondary-school level, both in the classroom and in self-study. The initial focus is on the senior phase of the Scottish Curriculum for Excellence (S4-S6); some materials will also be suitable for use in the earlier stages (S1-S3). Within the project's scope we will also investigate the potential for use of our materials in the UK more broadly. With input from teachers and learners in focus groups and testing sessions, we will create a range of freely available materials: (1) worksheets on metaphor in literary and journalistic texts; (2) a set of interactive online activities focusing on specific areas of meaning in which metaphor is especially productive (e.g. how are concepts like LOVE, ANGER, DEATH expressed metaphorically); (3) downloadable lesson notes for teachers; (4) an educationally-targeted version of the Map with new online instructions, incorporating information pages on topics including metaphor in text, metaphor and language change, and metaphor in literature, and an annotated bibliography of web and print materials on metaphor, aimed at secondary schools; (5) an App to enable learners to interact with the Map on tablets and mobile devices. The resources will be promoted in the first instance through talks at educational events and links on relevant websites.