helping foreign language learners to make sense of literature with metaphor awareness-raising

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Helping Foreign Language Learners to Make Sense ofLiterature with Metaphor Awareness-raisingJonathan D. Picken aa Department of English , Tsuda College , JapanPublished online: 05 Jan 2009.

To cite this article: Jonathan D. Picken (2005) Helping Foreign Language Learners to Make Sense of Literature withMetaphor Awareness-raising, Language Awareness, 14:2-3, 142-152, DOI: 10.1080/09658410508668830

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Helping Foreign Language Learners toMake Sense of Literature with MetaphorAwareness-raising

Jonathan D. PickenDepartment of English, Tsuda College, Japan

EFL students of English literature face the substantial challenge of making sense ofliterary texts written in a foreign language. EFL teachers working with these studentsneed to understand the problems that they face and develop ways of helping them toovercome them. This article focuses on metaphor in literature and on whether aware-ness raising work related to conceptual metaphors (CMs) helps EFL students to makesense of the linguistic metaphors that they encounter in literature. In particular, theresearch focuses on making sense of ‘invisible’ metaphors – linguistic metaphors thatare comparatively difficult to identify in context. Three studies involving students in adepartment of English in Japan are presented. The studies provide evidence that CMawareness-raising increases the likelihood that metaphorical readings of invisiblemetaphors will occur, both in the short and in the longer term. However, one of thestudies also shows that CM awareness-raising can be a source of confusion due to thefact that different CMs may share the same source domain. Thus, Life Is A Journey andLove Is A Journey share the source domain Journey, and this can cause confusion whenstudents encounter a Journey-related metaphor in a literary text.

Keywords: metaphor, literature, metaphor awareness-raising, EFL

IntroductionEven for native speakers of a language, the challenge of making sense of liter-

ary texts can be formidable. This challenge is all the greater for students readingliterature in a foreign language that they are attempting to master. Nevertheless,the need to develop literary competence may be pressing, e.g. for EFL students indepartments of English literature. EFL teachers who work with such studentsneed to understand the problems that their students face and to developinformed teaching practices that will help them to overcome these problems. Theresearch presented here is designed to contribute to such practice by focusing onmetaphor in literature. Specifically, the research investigates the effectiveness ofraising students’ awareness of conceptual metaphors (CMs) as a means of help-ing them to make sense of metaphor in literature.

The psycholinguist Raymond Gibbs (1994) suggests that there are four stagesin the processing of metaphor: Comprehension, Recognition, Interpretation, andAppreciation. The present research is particularly relevant to the first and thirdstages. Previous studies have shown that language learners may not compre-hend and interpret a metaphor as a metaphor at all but read it literally instead(Picken, 2001; Winner, 1988). Inevitably, the literal reading of a metaphor cangive rise to a dramatically different understanding of a literary text.

Relatively ‘invisible’ metaphors (Stockwell, 2000) are particularly likely to be

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read literally, and invisible metaphors are also common in literature (Brooke-Rose, 1958; Goatly, 1997). The research discussed below centres on the idea thatby raising students’ awareness of CMs, teachers can make their students moreaware of the metaphorical potential of relatively invisible linguistic metaphors.This awareness should increase the visibility of the linguistic metaphors andraise the likelihood that students will read them metaphorically both in the shortterm and in the longer term. By doing this, EFL teachers can contribute to theirstudents’ development as independent interpreters of literature.

Before the awareness-raising research can be discussed, it is necessary toexplain some of the concepts used above (CM, linguistic metaphor, invisiblemetaphor, etc.) and to provide a brief review of the relevant background litera-ture. This is the focus of the following section. The concepts will be illustratedwith reference to Robert Frost’s poem ‘Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening’(‘Woods’). This was also one of the texts used in the three awareness-raisingstudies discussed.

Background

The woods are lovely, dark, and deep,But I have promises to keep,And miles to go before I sleep,And miles to go before I sleep.(Final stanza of Frost’s ‘Woods’)

In metaphor theory, the distinction between conceptual metaphor andlinguistic metaphor is crucial. Metaphor theory has long been concerned with thelatter, and traditionally ‘miles to go’ and ‘sleep’ in the poem ‘Woods’ (see above)might be treated as (linguistic) metaphors for, e.g. ‘duties to accomplish’ and‘die’ respectively. With the advent of Lakoff and Johnson’s (1980, 1999) concep-tual metaphor (CM) theory, it has become necessary to make a distinction. Lakoffand Johnson would agree that Frost’s poem contains linguistic metaphors, butthey are more interested in the ideas or CMs that motivate these linguistic meta-phors in a patterned way. With reference to ‘miles to go’, they would draw atten-tion to the CM Life Is A Journey1 and to the conventional and unconventionallinguistic metaphors in everyday language that reflect this. Because we think oflife as a kind of journey, we often speak of life in journey-related terms. Thus, weconventionally speak of being at a ‘crossroads’ in life; less conventionally, wemay say that we have ‘miles to go’ in life, as Frost does in ‘Woods.’ (For furtherdiscussion of linguistic and conceptual metaphors, see Cameron, 2003; Kövecses,2002).

Gibbs (1994) suggests that linguistic metaphor processing takes place in fourstages. First, there is the immediate, on-line Comprehension of a metaphor: Areader comprehends Frost’s ‘miles to go’ as, e.g. ‘duties to accomplish’. Furtherconscious thought may lead to an explicit, declarative Recognition that this is anexample of a metaphor. Detailed conscious Interpretation may also occur andraise questions about whether ‘miles’ represents ‘duration’ or ‘exertion’ or ‘duty’or a combination of these. Finally, Appreciation of the metaphor may occur, andthe reader may evaluate it highly for being, e.g. thought-provoking. Gibbs (1994:263) argues that CM theory ‘is best able to explain many different aspects of

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metaphor understanding, including some parts of comprehension, interpreta-tion, and appreciation’.

The subjective nature of metaphor processing also needs to be recognised.Stockwell (2000: 193) suggests that metaphor is ultimately a ‘way of reading’, andthis subjectivity can be seen in the way that L1 children sometimes read meta-phors literally. Winner (1988) mentions the case of a six-year-old child who inter-prets the (potential) metaphor The prison guard became a hard rock in a literal wayby invoking magic: magic literally turned the guard into a hard rock in thischild’s reading of the sentence. Cameron (1999, 2003) draws attention to theopposite phenomenon. Sometimes children interpret stretches of literally-intended language in a metaphorical way, and she introduces the term ‘processmetaphor’ to describe these cases. Literal readings of metaphors also occuramong FL learners. Picken (2001) discusses literal interpretations of ‘she wasdrowning’ in Japanese students’ readings of the short story ‘Carpathia’(Kercheval, 1996). At this point in the story, the ‘she’ in question is standing nextto her husband at a party, and she is in emotional despair, ‘drowning’ because ofa callous comment made by her husband. However, the majority of students tookthe ‘drowning’ literally by making sense of it either as a literal drowning experi-enced by the wife (or a different woman) in the past, or as a hypothetical drown-ing of the wife herself. In Gibbs’s terms, it could be said that a literalcomprehension of ‘drowning’ led to literal interpretations among these students.

In Picken (2001, 2004), the likelihood of literal readings among FL learners wasrelated to the degree of ‘visibility’ (Stockwell, 2000) or ‘explicitness’ (Goatly,1997) of linguistic metaphors. Metaphors like ‘drowning’ and ‘miles to go beforeI sleep’ are relatively invisible, and this makes it easy to read them in a literal way.Metaphor visibility varies depending on how linguistic resources are deployed.(See Stockwell, 2000: 185–90, and Goatly, 1997: 168–70, for details.) Thus, ‘I havemiles to go in life before I sleep eternally’ is a more visible (or explicit) version ofFrost’s line because it makes clear that Frost is concerned with non-literal ‘miles’in life rather than physical miles and with ‘sleeping’ eternally rather than withnormal sleep. Goatly’s (1997) and Brooke-Rose’s (1958) corpus studies of meta-phor provide evidence that relatively invisible metaphors are common in litera-ture.

Inspired, in part, by Boers’s (2000) work on metaphor awareness-raising invocabulary acquisition, the present research investigates the effect of suchawareness-raising on FL learners’ readings of relatively invisible metaphors inliterature. This specifically involves raising learners’ awareness of CMs. The ideais simple: if learners are made aware of CMs like Life Is A Journey, it seems likelythat they will use this awareness when they encounter journey-related languagein literature (and elsewhere). For example, when they encounter ‘miles to go’ in‘Woods,’ an awareness of Life Is A Journey may help to trigger life-related inter-pretations of this linguistic metaphor. Lakoff (1993) makes a similar case for therole of this CM in the interpretation of a stanza from Frost’s ‘The Road NotTaken’, and Gibbs and Nascimento (1996) provide experimental evidence thatCMs play a role in the processing of literary metaphors by native speakers.

The research should not be viewed as a simplistic attempt to help students tomake ‘the’ correct interpretation of metaphors in literary texts. Literary interpre-tation is problematic in theory and practice (e.g. Fish, 1980). Consequently,

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Widdowson (1975: 264) argues for the position that teachers’ efforts should notbe geared towards reaching one specific interpretation but towards bringing thelearner ‘to the point where he is capable of teasing out meanings for himself’. Theresearch presented here should be viewed in this light. By raising students’awareness of CMs, the teacher will ideally be engaged in developing learners’abilities to ‘tease out’ metaphorical meanings on their own. Some of these inter-pretations will be in line with what experts have written. Others may be implau-sible or outrageous. However, as Culler (1992: 110) puts it, even extremeinterpretations can be valuable because they ‘have a better chance . . . of bringingto light connections or implications not previously noticed or reflected on than ifthey strive to remain “sound” or moderate’.

Rather than just focus on the general question of whether metaphor awarenessraising helps to trigger metaphorical readings of linguistic metaphors, theresearch was designed specifically to find initial answers to three questions: (1)how much awareness-raising is necessary to trigger metaphorical readings in theshort term? (2) does relatively extensive awareness raising trigger metaphoricalreadings when students have no reason to expect that a CM is relevant? (3) isawareness raising a potential source of confusion due to the fact that a singlesource domain (e.g. Journey) can be used in a number of different CMs? Thus,when students encounter journey-related language in a poem, will they be ableto decide between relating this language to Life (via Life Is A Journey) or to Love(via Love Is A Journey)?

The orientation of the questions is pedagogical. The findings should allowteachers to make decisions about how much work is necessary to help studentswith the immediate task of processing metaphors in a specific literary text, andthey should also provide information on whether this help benefits students inthe longer term by improving their processing skills and making them moreindependent as interpreters of literature. The ‘Woods’ study focused mainly onquestion 1, although it also provided some information related to question 2. The‘Road’ study focused exclusively on question 2, and the Love/Life study onquestion 3.

The ‘Woods’ StudyTable 1 provides an overview of the research design and findings of the

‘Woods’ study. Forty-nine first-year students in an English department at awomen’s college in Japan participated in the study. All these students were giventhe task of reading Frost’s ‘Woods’ and writing interpretations in Japanese of itsfinal lines, but they were given a different amount of help in preparation for this.In connection with research question 1 (see above), groups 1, 3, 4, and 5 are therelevant ones.

Group 1 students got the greatest amount of preparation. They were taughtexplicitly about Life Is A Journey and given examples of conventional linguisticmetaphors related to this CM, and, after this, they worked in groups discussinghow to interpret some creative linguistic metaphors related to the CM. In addi-tion to this, the instructions on their task sheet explicitly connected Frost’s poemto Life Is A Journey. No preparatory work took place in groups 3, 4, and 5, but thegroups got different kinds of help from their task sheets. The task sheet for group


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4, like the task sheet for group 1, made an explicit connection with Life Is A Jour-ney as follows: ‘Many experts think that this poem expresses an idea about life bycomparing life to a journey, especially in the poem’s final lines.’ Group 3 studentswere told only that, according to experts, the ‘poem really expresses an ideaabout life’. In other words, their help was limited to information about the targetdomain of the CM (Life); the source domain (Journey) was not given. Group 5,finally, got no help at all. Their task sheet just informed them that the poem is‘famous’ and that ‘poetry experts around the world have written about it’.

While Table 1 clearly shows that extensive metaphor awareness raising helpsto trigger metaphorical readings (all 10 students in group 1 produced them intheir written interpretations of the final lines), it is also clear that less help isenough to produce almost identical results (respectively nine and eight meta-phorical readings out of 10 in groups 4 and 3). At the same time, it is also clear thatmetaphorical readings hardly occurred when no help was given: there was onlyone such reading among the 10 in group 5. Some students in this group did notinterpret the lines at all, while others commented on the lines in terms of a realphysical distance that needed to be travelled. Among the overall total of 32 meta-phorical readings, there were a couple of surprises (e.g. ‘miles to go’ refers to thefact that people ‘continue to evolve’), but the vast majority interpreted ‘miles’ aslife’s duration or obligations and ‘sleep’ as death.

CM awareness-raising may be valuable as a one-off way of helping students tomake metaphorical sense of a particular text, but, ideally, its value should extendbeyond this. The CM Life Is A Journey is used in many literary (and non-literary)texts, and it would contribute substantially to the students’ independence asinterpreters if CM awareness raising could help them to discover linguistic meta-phors related to this CM even when they have no reason to expect that it may berelevant. (See research question 2) Group 2 in Table 1 provides some insight intothis question.

The students in group 2, like their classmates in group 1, had been involved inan earlier interpretation study, and at the beginning of the study-related class Iannounced that there would be another such study at the end of the class. Theclass itself was concerned with Carter et al.’s (1997: 83–96) unit on metaphor inWorking with Texts, and the extensive work on Life Is A Journey was introducedagainst the background of this unit. In other words, the CM-related work was setup as a normal component of class work, and during the class it was not


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Table 1 Research design and findings of the ‘Woods’ study

Group Preparation Reading task Metaphorical readings1 Taught about LIAJ

+ given examples of LIAJ+ interpretation practice

Interpret lines withreference to LIAJ

10 (out of 10)

2 Interpret lines 4 (out of 9)3 No preparatory work Interpret lines with

reference to ‘life’8 (out of 10)

4 Interpret lines withreference to LIAJ

9 (out of 10)

5 Interpret lines 1 (out of 10)Note: LIAJ = Life Is A Journey



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connected to the interpretation study in any way. In the final 20 minutes of theclass, the students got the ‘Woods’ task sheets. While the task sheet for group 1made an explicit connection with Life Is A Journey, the task sheet for group 2 didnot. Their sheet, like the one given to group 5, provided no help at all. Neverthe-less, the group had just done extensive work on Life Is A Journey, and as a resultfour of the 10 students in group 2 interpreted the final lines of the poem meta-phorically (compared with one of the 10 students in group 5, who got the sametask sheet but did no preparatory CM-related work). This difference betweengroups 1 and 5 is obviously a small one, but the trend suggests that CM aware-ness raising helped to trigger metaphorical readings in group 2 even though thestudents had been given no reason to expect that the CM in question would berelevant. The ‘Road’ study below follows up on this finding.

The ‘Road’ Study

I shall be telling this with a sighSomewhere ages and ages hence:Two roads diverged in a wood, and I –I took the one less traveled by,And that has made all the difference.(Final stanza of Frost’s ‘The Road Not Taken’)

The follow-up ‘Road’ study was carried out three months after the ‘Woods’study. A total of 43 students participated. Eighteen of these were from groups 1and 2 in the ‘Woods’ study. In other words, these were students who had had anextensive awareness-raising session related to Life Is A Journey a few monthsearlier. These students reappear as the LIAJ group in Table 2. The 25 students inthe NonLIAJ group had not been taught about Life Is A Journey. The text used inthe study was Frost’s ‘The Road Not Taken’. (Lakoff [1993] discusses the connec-tion between this poem and Life Is A Journey.) The task consisted of writing aninterpretation in Japanese of the poem’s final stanza.

This second study provided fairly strong support for the idea that CM aware-ness-raising helps to trigger metaphorical readings even when students have noreason to expect that a CM is relevant. As Table 2 shows, roughly two-thirds(72%) of the students in the LIAJ group interpreted Frost’s lines metaphoricallyin terms of life and making choices in life. In contrast, only 56% of the students inthe NonLIAJ group produced such readings. (The remaining literal readings inboth groups mainly consisted of direct line-by-line translations of the stanza intoJapanese.) While the difference between the groups is not statistically significant,the trend suggests that CM awareness raising has a long-term effect and contrib-


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Table 2 Metaphorical readings in the ‘Road’ study

Processing/ Group LIAJ group (= groups 1 and2 in Table 1)

NonLIAJ group

Metaphorical readings 13 (72%) 14 (56%)Literal readings 5 11Total: 18 25



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utes to EFL students’ ability to interpret metaphor and literature independently.This confirms the trend found among group 2 students in the ‘Woods’ study.

The Love/Life StudyThe preceding studies investigated the value of CM awareness raising with a

focus on a single CM: Life Is A Journey. In practice, however, hundreds of CMshave been identified. (See Kövecses, 2002: 281–5, for a partial list.) Against thisbackground, it is reasonable to ask whether CM awareness-raising remainsbeneficial when students have been taught more than one of them. One particu-lar issue is whether an awareness of multiple CMs can be a source of confusion.This is a real possibility given the fact that the same source domain may be usedin a range of CMs. (Kövecses [2002: 16–20] lists 13 widely used source domains.)Thus, the Journey source domain is shared by the two CMs chosen for the presentstudy: Love Is A Journey and Life Is A Journey. The study investigated whetheran awareness of both of these CMs would be a source of confusion amongstudents who were asked to interpret Frost’s ‘Woods.’2

Seventeen third-year students participated in the study. Like the students inthe previous studies, they were female Japanese students in a department ofEnglish literature. The task sheet contained a brief explanation, with examples, ofthe two CMs. The connection with Frost’s poem was made as follows:

The ideas that love is a journey or that life is a journey are often used inpoems and other literary texts. Please read the following poem by RobertFrost and decide whether either of these ideas is used. Then do the tasksthat follow.

There were two tasks: in an MCQ task, the students had to circle the CM that theyconsidered relevant (or circle (c) if they felt that neither CM was relevant), andthey also had to interpret Frost’s final lines with reference to their chosen CM.

It turned out that the relevant choice of CM was not an obvious one for thestudents. The choice divided the group down the middle, with nine studentschoosing Love Is A Journey and seven students choosing Life Is A Journey. (Onestudent did not circle anything on her task sheet.) One can only speculate whyLove Is A Journey was such a popular choice, but the poem’s focus on ‘he’ in thefirst stanza may be one reason.3 This ‘he’ is mentioned three times in the first fourlines, which makes it clear that ‘he’ is very much on the speaker’s mind. Why isthe speaker thinking about ‘him’ so much? It is easy to see why students mightthink that romantic motives are involved.

Viewed as a love poem, ‘Woods’ mainly became a poem about an unhappylove relationship, especially one of unrequited love. Many students also saw thewoods as a symbol of the poem’s ‘he’, the loved one. As a result, they worked outthe idea that the speaker is attracted to the wood but admiring it from a distance.This distance was then taken to represent the distance in their feelings: Thespeaker loves ‘the woods/the loved one’ from a distance. In the final line, ‘milesto go’ was also interpreted in terms of this ‘distance’ or ‘gap’ in their feelings insome cases.


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Discussion of the StudiesThe overall picture is that CM awareness raising of some kind substantially

affects the likelihood that metaphorical interpretations will occur in the immedi-ate task of making sense of a linguistic metaphor in a specific literary text. Withawareness raising, students almost invariably arrived at metaphorical interpre-tations of the final lines of ‘Woods’. Without awareness-raising, only one studentin ten managed to do this in the ‘Woods’ study. The amount of awareness-raisinghardly mattered. Extensive awareness raising only produced slightly moremetaphorical interpretations of the poem’s final lines than the bare-bones expla-nation that the final lines are viewed as a comment on ‘life’.

The value of extensive awareness raising was reflected in another finding inthe ‘Woods’ study: extensive work on Life Is A Journey produced four metaphor-ical readings in a group of nine students even though the task sheet gave no indi-cation that this CM was relevant. In contrast, only one metaphorical readingoccurred among 10 students who received the same task sheet but who had nothad any CM-related instruction prior to the task. This difference suggests thatCM awareness-raising helps to trigger metaphorical interpretations even whenstudents have no reason to expect that a CM is relevant.

Further evidence for this second finding was produced in the ‘Woods’ study.Three months after an extensive awareness-raising session on Life Is A Journey,a group of students was asked to write interpretations of the final stanza ofFrost’s ‘Road’. Almost 75% of the students in this group interpreted the linesmetaphorically. This contrasted with a rate of 56% of such readings in anothergroup of students who did this task without the benefit of prior CM awarenessraising. This, again, suggests that CM awareness-raising contributes to EFLstudents’ ability to make independent interpretations of metaphors in literarytexts.

In one sense, the Love/Life study provided further support for the value ofCM awareness raising. The students in this study also arrived at metaphoricalinterpretations of the final lines even though their interpretations variedsubstantially depending on the CM that they selected as relevant. However, thestudy was mainly designed to find an answer to research question 3: Is aware-ness-raising a potential source of confusion due to the fact that a single sourcedomain (e.g. Journey) can be used in a number of different CMs? The studyshows that confusion is a real possibility: nine students interpreted ‘Woods’ withreference to Love Is A Journey while seven students chose Life Is A Journey.These choices led to dramatically divergent interpretations.

Inevitably, the studies’ findings need to be treated with caution given thedemographics of the students involved: students in a department of Englishliterature at a women’s college in Japan. To confirm the findings, further workwith both male and female students in different cultures is desirable. Compara-tive studies involving NS and non-NS students should be a part of this furtherresearch. Work with other texts is also necessary. For example, the problem ofchoosing the relevant CM in the Life/Love study may not be a common one. Inother words, the study’s findings may have resulted mainly from idiosyncraticqualities of the poem itself, such as the poem’s focus on the significant butunidentified ‘he’. Thus, it seems unlikely that love-related interpretations would


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have occurred if ‘Road’ had been selected for the study, because this poem onlyhas an ‘I’. There is no ‘he’, no character with the potential status of a significant(romantic) other in the poem.

In relating the studies to teaching practice, caution is also necessary. In thestudies, the CM awareness raising work took place prior to the metaphor inter-pretation tasks. The same sequence could certainly be used in EFL classes, but areverse sequence would make equal sense. In other words, work on poems like‘Woods’ and ‘Road’ could be used as a starting point for work on the Life Is AJourney CM. For example, students could discuss interpretations of these poemsin groups, and the teacher could use these interpretations to introduce Life Is AJourney and related awareness-raising activities.

From the teacher’s perspective, the third study is likely to be the most prob-lematic. CM awareness-raising may help to bring the students to the pointwhere, as Widdowson (1975) puts it, they can ‘tease out’ metaphorical meaningson their own, but is this desirable if it leads to interpretations such as the ‘love’interpretation of ‘Woods’? This is certainly an issue, but it can also be viewed asan opportunity, notably an opportunity to raise awareness of the problems of theinterpretation process itself. This is related to Culler’s (1992: 110) idea thatextreme interpretations can be valuable for bringing out ‘connections or implica-tions not previously noticed or reflected on’. The differences in interpretationthat occurred in the Love/Life study could also be valuable for this reason. Forexample, the ‘love’ interpretation has the virtue of highlighting the significanceof ‘he’ in the poem, and the teacher could exploit this. ‘Love’ is certainly one wayof accounting for this significance, but are there alternatives? How is ‘he’accounted for in Life Is A Journey interpretations in which the narrator is ponder-ing the remaining ‘miles’ in life and the death at their end? How have peopletraditionally tried to make sense of life and death in Western cultures? Questionslike this may lead to religion and the question of whether ‘he’ may be God. Theymay also lead to reinterpretations of the poem and, by extension, to a greaterawareness of the interpretation process itself. By switching the perspective fromphysical love to religion, students will experience at first hand how dramaticallya reading may change.

While the research was framed with reference to EFL students in departmentsof English, it is worth noting, in conclusion, that it is also of potential relevance inother contexts. Widdowson (1975) makes the broad argument that work withliterature is beneficial to language learners in general because it helps them todevelop their interpretative skills, and these interpretative skills are necessaryfor making sense of all discourse. The research presented above could easily beextended in this direction by investigating whether metaphor awareness-raisingwork also helps EFL learners to make sense of metaphor in non-literarydiscourses.

ConclusionThe three studies described in this article investigated the immediate

short-term effects of explicit CM awareness-raising and the longer-term valuethat this kind of instruction might have for the development of interpretativeskills. With regard to the short-term effects, evidence was provided that CM


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awareness-raising, even of a superficial kind, helps to stimulate metaphoricalreadings of metaphors in literary texts. With regard to the longer-term effects ofCM-related teaching, a subtler picture emerged. Students who had receiveddetailed instruction on the Life Is A Journey CM produced higher rates of meta-phorical readings in two of the studies when they had no reason to expect thatthis CM could be relevant to the interpretation of the literary texts that were used.These findings suggest that detailed CM awareness-raising work helps EFLstudents to develop the ability to interpret literature and metaphor in literatureindependently. However, the third study provided evidence that an awarenessof multiple CMs may also give rise to confusion, especially if these CMs share asource domain such as Journey. The paper concluded with an evaluation of thestudies’ findings and their implications for EFL teachers, and provided sugges-tions for further research against this background.

CorrespondenceAny correspondence should be directed to Professor J.D. Picken, Department

of English, Tsuda College, c/o 1-5-2 Tamagawagakuen, Machida, Tokyo, Japan194-0041 ([email protected]).

Notes1. Following Lakoff and Johnson (1999), only the first letters of CMs are capitalised. In an

earlier (and uglier) convention, CMs were written completely in small capitals.2. The choice of ‘Woods’ for the Love/Life study was partially motivated by the fact that

there had been suggestions of a love relationship between the poem’s narrator and thepoem’s ‘he’ in a couple of the literal readings in the ‘Woods’ study. The potential forlove-related readings of this poem clearly existed.

3. In his comments on an earlier version of the paper, Geoff Hall pointed out thatfollow-up interviews would have been useful for getting data on why studentsselected Love Is A Journey rather than Life Is A Journey. Interviews and other oraldata-gathering methods such as thinking out loud would certainly be an importantcomplement to written interpretation data of the kind obtained in the three studiesdiscussed above.

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helping foreign language learners to make sense of literature with metaphor awareness-raising

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