Humanising Language Teaching
Year 3; Issue 6; November 2001

Metaphor, language, learning, and affect

Recent developments in cognitive linguistics have revealed how abstract meaning in language is shaped by bodily experience. We understand and express such concepts as time, causation, direction or love through metaphors that are shaped out of our sense of ourselves as embodied creatures (Lakoff 1987, Johnson 1989, 1991, 1992, 1993). In English, some prepositions still reveal how we infer concepts of spatial direction from the sense we have of our own bodies. The head leads the body. The head holds the eyes. Our eyes face forward and when we walk towards what they reveal, we move 'ahead'. The sense of our 'back' or 'be+hind' conceptualises an opposite direction. In such prepositions, we can see how, over time, metaphor shifts lexical meaning towards grammatical meaning (Heine 1997). For example, possession is core concept for the human mind. The possession of food is a defence against starvation and confers a right to survival. The human hand and its grip means that possession is finally about what we can hold and loss is about what we release from the fist or have snatched from it. To take hold of some quarry is to complete a pursuit. Possession is completion. Gaining possession thus signifies an act of completion. Interestingly, languages use this propositional schema of possession to express various notions of time (Heine 1993). In English and other Indo-European languages we use verbs of possession to express how in having taken hold of an action, we have completed it. Thus we grammaticalise a possessive 'have' (haber, avoir, etc.) or 'ter' (hold in Portuguese) to express an immediate past, or finally, as in modern French, the past itself.

1) I have done it
2) Je l'ai fait (I have done it or I did it)

If we retain an object, the object continues to exist in the sphere of our immediate attention. In English there is also a sense in which the things that we store or hoard continue for us, while those that we use up or relinquish fall out of the grasp of mind. So it is also for time and the actions that occur within it. A kept action is a constantly recurring action as when 'we keep doing the same thing.'

The metaphorical processes that have shaped and continue to shape abstract meaning in language are increasingly well understood by cognitive linguists. Language teachers are now asking how they can use this cognitivist re-examination of what they teach. Low (1988) made a pioneering examination of what he termed metaphorical competence. He broke down a 'metaphoric competence' into such elements as 'the ability to construct plausible meanings,' 'to differentiate between new metaphors, conventional metaphors and idiosyncratic extensions of old ones'. He further saw it as incorporating an awareness of how to avoid the coinage of absurd metaphors and an understanding of the 'hedges' which signal whether a statement is to be interpreted metaphorically or not. Finally, he argued for the inclusion of the social sensitivity of certain metaphors such as the gender-biased extension of 'man' to represent humanity (Low: 1988: 130-132). However, this type of argument largely missed the point that cognitivists were making about the nature of language, meaning and metaphor. Their assertion is not that metaphor posits another area of language knowledge which speakers have to acquire, but that it is fundamental to the way in which they conceptualise meaning. More relevant is the work of Lindostromberg (1991) or Dudley Evans (1998) who suggested that conceptual metaphors might prove an effective mechanism to help learners of specialist language group some forms of specialist lexis. Thus a conceptual metaphors, such as 'business is war', Lakoff and Johnson (1980) or 'movement is liquid' can help students to understand the language of finance, gathering and structuring their understanding of such terms as, 'take-over battle', 'capital liquidity' and 'company floatation'. In this vein, Boers (2000) conducted a classroom experiment where students who used conceptual metaphors in this way had a significantly better recall of the lexis than those who did not. My interest is in taking this argument one step further, by showing how the mechanisms through which linguistic meaning is conceptualised can themselves become the mechanism through which second languages are taught.

In this paper, I wish to show how we can carry forward this type of exploration in a more ambitious manner. I will first argue how cognitive explorations of metaphor as a device of meaning creation can be linked to the work of those who perceive it as a mechanism for learning and as a pathway between knowledge and emotion. I will suggest that my concept of metaphor has the capacity to draw together the currently fractured pieces of language, affect, and learning. I will show how this can happen at the classroom level by looking at an example of teaching the present perfect.

Language teaching as a house divided

Recent language teaching theory has failed to produce an approach that is meaningful or consistent. Since the decline of behaviourism there has been a gulf between the methods through which language is described and the mechanisms through which it is thought to be acquired or learnt. Communicative methodology divides into what Howatt (1984) calls the weak and the strong approaches. The weak supposes an interest in how we use grammar and lexical phrases to realise a given communicative function such as telling a story. The strong supposes a more over-riding concern with helping students to express meaning at the expense of accuracy. It suggests a meaning-focused approach where students are distracted from thinking about language per se by their need to use it in problem-solving tasks, or 'procedures' as Prabhu (1987) called them. In this case, 'the invented example', whose objective is to put forward a given function, notion or structure, was replaced by 'bits of language lifted from their original context' or 'student generated' text (Cook 2000: 189).

Language acquisition is, if anything, an even more divergent area of study. At one extreme, SLA theory is based upon Krashen's (1981 and 1982) clear distinction between two processes:

• conscious learning, resulting in a monitored and hesitant use of language
• unconscious acquisition where learners rediscover the faculties that helped them to acquire their first language.

At the other end of the SLA spectrum, scholars such as Ellis (1990) and Pienneman (1998) have shown a considerable interest in what are called cognitive strategies, that is in the learning processes that students employ in order to understand and reuse language. For them, a complete dichotomy between the natural and unconscious process of acquisition and the conscious and artificial procedures of learning would be false.

Metaphor as a unifying theory

What is evident is the lack of a clear relationship between communicative language teaching theory and acquisition theory. Interestingly in its wider conception, metaphor can be implicated in both sides of the process. As we have shown, metaphor builds abstract meaning in language. But metaphor is also mechanism of learning. We grasp new knowledge by analogy to the models we already possess (Petrie and Oshlag 1993). This ability to map the known onto the unknown and thus to give it a conceptual framework holds the key to what Plato termed Meno's problem, the question of how we can grasp new knowledge, as of language, when we have no old knowledge on which to graft it. Yet role of metaphor in learning is larger even than this.

The use of metaphor as an artistic device indicates its capacity to have an emotional impact and associates it with the force of 'affect'. Metaphor can be perceived as category extension. The statement that 'Juliet is the sun' posits a breaking down of the details of the sun's form into a less secure sense of the attributes that the sun and Juliet share. There is a tempting parallelism between this assault on the distinctiveness of a form and the nature of 'affect' itself. Simon (1982: 336-37) characterised affect as diffuse and difficult to classify when measured against the precision of cognitive operations upon 'strings' of 'symbols'. It is as if metaphor, in suggesting an assault upon the security of the symbol is symptomatic of a wider assay by 'affect' upon the integrity of cognitive operations.

Yet the very existence of metaphor warns against our taking the contrast of cognition and affect too far. 'Cognitive operations' can be seen as riding 'piggy back' upon those of the emotional kind, (Bruner 1986). Affect helps us to represent cognitive operations to ourselves as significant and meaningful, thus presupposing their underpinning as emotionally significant and memorable rather than as insignificant, mental ephemera. It may determine positions in apparently rational argument as much as reason itself (Lakoff and Johnson 1999).

The tension between notions of affect and cognition may also reveal itself in how the interest in affect has roots in behaviourist psychology. For example, Pavlov's interest was in conditioning emotional responses to specific phenomena as when an eleven-month old boy was taught to alternatively like and dislike a white rat according to whether or not its appearance was heralded by a frightening sound (Davison and Neale 1986). For the cognitivist, it may be more difficult to accommodate this evocation of responses that are free from conscious mediation. Metaphor research might prove to be a means through which these two opposing trains of thought can be reconciled, if only because it encourages the possession of meaning by individual schematisation of experience.

The interest in how we can condition a subject into associating a phenomenon with a particular emotion works through to humanistic educational programmes and the interest in giving a learning objective a more intense emotional value. Such learning objectives can also be formulated as learning about oneself, as in the domain of psychotherapy. Cox and Theilgaard (1987: 18) discuss how psychotherapy can be 'facilitated by the use of image and metaphor.' Thus, a subject's emotional world can be 'contained, changed or consolidated' by the use of poetic imagery. There is a potential, directional paradox, however, in that the objective of psychotherapy is to begin with the superficial then to go 'deep'. By contrast, metaphor provokes an affective response almost before it is consciously understood, touching an emotional depth before a reflective surface. The paradox can be reconciled in that a goal of psychotherapy is to bring poorly formulated thoughts to the surface. Metaphors that are superficially mundane or 'faded' can suddenly be vested with significance as when a patient apologises for being late because a dentist has been taking their 'crowns' off and the therapist asks:

How many crowns have you had?
Are you talking about teeth?
I'm talking about crowns (ibid: 105)

And the therapist can then start to explore the significance of a 'crown' to the patient, perhaps returning to its literal referent or by playing with its other associated meanings in order to trawl for the thoughts that a subject may need to express.

The alertness of a successful therapist to the metaphorical significance of a casually used term must have clear lessons for language teachers. They can focus on this casual emergence of meaning in an off-hand remark in order to help students track chains of associations. The associations will not only loosen students' thoughts and trigger the language in which to express them but may also help to explore the webs of meaning out of which a language has been constructed. In this way, a teacher can use a conceptual metaphor such as 'up is happy' to introduce language for describing positive states of mind (on top of the world, on an up etc.). The conceptual metaphor brings order to an idiomatic and superficially chaotic area of language. It also becomes the means through which students can explore their own memories. Thus, the metaphor guides them into a language's conceptual core and fosters an emotional identification with it.

The suggestion is that the classroom is set up as a zone of conceptual networking where students should hunt down the topics that are meaningful to them, giving an affective underpinning to their intellectual construction of language knowledge. They should discover a coincidence between mechanisms through which meaning is built in language and those through which the resultant construct is acquired. Because that coincidence lies in the metaphorical nature of language and learning, its discovery may also connect language knowledge to zones of affect with which metaphor will put the learner in contact. For the ELT specialist, metaphor enfolds itself within the three points of meaning construction/constructed meaning, learning and affect. It can thus conjoin the three aspects of successful language learning, as shown in figure 5 below.

By adopting the role of participant observer, I now examine how this conception can translate into classroom practice and how the resultant procedures may require modification when they confront the realities of the adult language classroom.

Many teachers already intuit the strength of this argument. For example, the 'state is location' metaphor (Lakoff and Johnson 1999), derives from a wider conceptualisation of time and the actions within it as space. When we say, 'I am going to sleep', we posit a state, 'sleep' as a state towards which we are in motion. More broadly, the future, itself, is a destination in space towards which we travel. Teachers who use time lines to teach a tense system have always understood this. Teachers who treat their classroom space as itself a metaphor of time, with forward points and past points, can elaborate upon the strength of this metaphor, relocating time structures in the spatial metaphors from which they have been derived. I will now consider exactly what this means when applied to classroom practice by consider the case of the present perfect in English.

The perfect and the representation of the past

Different languages structure the past differently and with varying degrees of complexity. The present perfect/past simple distinction is far from unique but causes considerable difficulty nonetheless. A curious but under-exploited feature of both the present and past perfect is their use of a possession schema (Heine 1993). One method of exploiting this is to reify the verb, or make its past participle an object to which the student lays claim. Laying claim to the verb is made synonymous with laying claim to the action that it signifies. A procedure can be unfolded as follows:

1. The teacher tells students the past simple form of a verb then asks them to change it into an irregular past participle. The teacher writes each past participle and each past simple onto separate pieces of paper as they elicit the correct form from the students.
   
   
2. The teacher distributes the papers with the participles to the students.
   
   
3. Students say they 'have' (in their hands) their participle, e.g. I have 'spoken'. Other students try to remember what they 'have'
   
   
4. The teacher indicates two students, A and B. Student A says He/she has 'spoken'. Students B replies either: 'Yes I have', or 'no I haven't, I have eaten'.
   
   
5. The teacher draws a prison diagram on the board. The teacher says past simple forms are imprisoned in the past. Present perfect forms are being released from the past and brought towards the present as if in the subject's hand. The teacher suggests a completed past action, e.g. 'I ate my first meal in a restaurant' and sticks the verb 'ate' inside the prison then suggests one that continues into the present, 'I have eaten' putting it outside the prison, on the road to the present.

Another approach that I tried recently with colleagues class involves using the space of the classroom to map time. In this, I arranged a group behind one volunteer who sat directly in front of me. I looked at him said, 'this is the end, at the end you think of what you haven't done. What haven't you done?' The volunteer flinched visibly, surprised, then composed himself and replied that he felt broadly satisfied. I wondered if I had chosen the wrong teacher. However, he then remembered something and said:

'I haven't fixed the roof'.
'What else?' I pressed.
'I haven't taken my children out'.

He began to recount a few other incidents, which I noted and distributed on pieces of paper to the class members sitting behind them.

'So you're satisfied with your life?' I asked the volunteer sceptically.
'Yes, I have done most of what I wanted'.
'What's that?'
He was vague and talked about fulfilment.
'You have fulfilled yourself?'
'Yes, mostly'
'How?'
He talked about a sense of spiritual equilibrium. I expressed this as:
'You found a balanced life?'
'Yes finally'. They then made a list of more general achievements, both in the classroom and outside. I also compiled a list.

I gave the list to the student in front and asked him to read the first item.
'I've fulfilled myself, mostly'. I then waved a piece of paper and half-chanted:
'But you haven't fixed the roof'. I made as if to give him the paper then take it away. He maintained his equanimity.
'No'.
I got another class member to wave their paper and say something else he hadn't done. They now did this every time the volunteer in front of them spoke. They began to sound like an eerie theatrical chorus:

'What have you done?'
'I have found a balanced life'.
'You haven't taken your child out' etc.

The chorus continued, waving actions as possessed objects, then faded.

Conclusions

We are only just beginning to understand how we can develop techniques from the new cognitive understanding of language and its links to learning. Other areas I have been exploring are how cognitive linguistics can help us in the teaching of articles, prepositions, metatext (text that talks about text) and the expression of logic. I have also been looking at the schematic basis of error and at how we can devise new approaches to error correction. Such explorations will advance our interest in bringing students into the conceptual core of their target language, thus helping them to fashion its meanings in accordance with the schematic principles that it has evolved. Understanding that 'barriers are impediments to actions' for example, provides students with an insight into the use of prepositions and verbs that is associated with the expression of a failure to reach our objectives, as in 'a last-minute hitch stopped me from making the deadline'. These are the schemata from which linguistic meanings are fashioned. Setting target language examples inside them, constitutes an invitation to the student to turn away from the spurious future contexts of communicative methodology and to deal in the substance out of which a language is shaped and through which it can be effectively learnt.

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