Redesigning ESL Lessons with Conceptual Metaphor
Consider the following phrases: “wake up,” “wash my face,” “brush my teeth.”
Do you know how to say them in another language?
If you have ever taken a foreign language class, these were probably some of the first phrases you learned. They may have been presented in a lesson called “daily routine” or “morning routine.” This is an excellent example of the approach most ESL / EFL textbooks take to presenting new vocabulary, in which words are selected based on their appearance in the same semantic frame.
In my experience this approach can have its place in the lower levels in which the emphasis is on learning to express basic ideas and laying the groundwork of the grammar system, but it is not optimally effective for vocabulary retention overall (Boers 2000). As students work their way through the lessons, vocabulary learning starts to become almost an act of “collection,” in which they ultimately study and attempt to acquire most new vocabulary through rote memorization.
Studies show that these challenges are only increased in the instance of polysemous words. Through my own teaching experience, I have found that cultivating awareness of the deeper semantic “story” that connects polysemous words, creates a more profound and lasting understanding for students, a contention that is supported by numerous other studies, notably the work of Boers (2000). To illustrate this idea, I have redesigned a lesson from esllibrary.com.
This website is popular among ESL teachers, and consistently produces thoughtful, well-staged lesson materials. It is my intention to demonstrate here that even materials of a high caliber can benefit from the introduction of Conceptual Metaphor Theory, because it presents a more effective way to learn new vocabulary, and a convenient format to address the often-overlooked metaphorical senses of common words. The lesson I chose is about “The Great Depression,” a topic it explores through a series of fairly standard reading and vocabulary exercises.
It opens with a few warm-up questions designed to activate students’ prior knowledge of the topic and elicit as much of the relevant vocabulary as possible. The next part is a matching exercise, in which students attempt to match a column of the vocabulary words to their appropriate definitions. These are key words that students will see in context in the reading passage on the next page--mostly technical finance terms (e.g. invest, debt, credit, recession, GDP). Students try to complete the matching exercise using only their prior knowledge. The teacher then checks the answers with the class, prompting students to call out the correct answer.
In my experience, this is the point at which it is easy to take too much time trying to contextualize and help students grasp each new vocabulary word. When using this lesson and others like it, I have sometimes found myself spending upwards of thirty or forty minutes just on the “Vocabulary Preview” before I see students’ faces relax into expressions of true comprehension. This style of presentation is meant to pre-teach key words to ensure the students understand the gist of the reading passage, but in my experience this approach is not always effective. This is because ultimately, students are struggling to internalize the new vocabulary through rote memorization--it becomes almost an act of “collecting” a list of words. Too often ESL instruction materials rely on this formula, and it is not nearly as effective as arming students with a deeper, more holistic knowledge of the conceptual structures at play.
I have in the past tried to activate deeper thinking by referring students to Latin roots, which sometimes transfer literal and metaphorical concepts across words. An example of this technique is found in the class in which I guided a student to understand the phrase “make an impression,” by drawing her attention to the verb “press” contained inside the unfamiliar word. From there I was able to elicit the literal, physical meaning of the word “press,” and its noun “impression” (using images of footsteps on sand and a handprint in a Tempur-pedic bed as aids). I was then able to use pantomime and body language to help her connect the literal meaning of “impression” to the metaphoric use in “make an impression.”
In this instance there happened to be a nice semantic chain between the words, and the student was advanced enough to find such guidance helpful, but it is in no way comprehensive, and it lends an advantage to students who are speakers of Romance languages (or related families). The introduction of cognitive metaphors within the topic of a lesson is a much more comprehensive method. It provides the deeper explanation that students crave when acquiring the different senses of highly polysemous words, and it arms students with a conceptual understanding that can help them intuit the meanings of other vocabulary--even after the lesson is over.
About the Original Lesson:
The lesson I chose to redesign centers around a reading passage that describes the Great Depression. My iteration will keep the central passage the same, but reimagine the activities utilizing conceptual metaphor. Because of the topic, most of the metaphors in the passage relate to the economy.
There were three main Mega Metaphors, presented below along with the language in the text that evokes them.
MORE IS UP: overproduction, unemployment reached 25%, keep prices high, keep wages high
FAILURE IS DOWN/LESS IS DOWN: economic decline, market crashed, trade began to fall, economic downturn, prices fell, GDP fell
ECONOMY IS A BODY: hurt economies, relief and recovery, banks suffered
There were a few other metaphors present in the text, including LIFE IS A PLAY (banks played a large role) and PROGRESS IS FORWARD MOTION (came to an end), but because they are only mentioned briefly, and because I would not want to overwhelm my students with too much abstract theory, I would not make mention of them. There is a containment metaphor within the text however, for which I designed an optional activity for the end of the lesson (which I would only use if students had responded well to the material and seemed ready for a challenge). This metaphor is:
STATES ARE CONTAINERS: pull the US out of recession
How I Would Redesign the Lesson
My redesigned lesson would be taught to a group of upper-intermediate or advanced students (B2 or C1 at least). Making the target comprehension level a little higher would make me feel more comfortable in assuming there will only be a few words in the text that students may not know. Because they will likely be able to comprehend the gist of the article without too much pre-teaching, I will be able to focus on the main cognitive metaphors in the reading passage and the language through which they manifest.
The “Warm-Up” section of the lesson would stay almost the same, and function to activate students’ prior knowledge of the topic. The first two questions in the original lesson plan actually introduce the concept of polysemy, asking students to consider whether “great” and “depression” can have more than one meaning and what those meanings are. Within this discussion I would attempt to elicit the terms “literal” and “metaphoric,” even perhaps pulling up a picture of a physical “depression” in the earth. The awareness of these distinctions will be useful throughout the rest of the lesson. I would keep a version of the “Vocabulary Preview” section to briefly go over / review the key financial terms (credit, debt, recession, GDP), but I would change it. Instead of a column of definitions to match the words to, I would use images that represented each word (e.g. a man with an empty wallet in one hand and a credit card in the other for “credit”). In pairs, students would attempt to match the vocabulary words to the correct images, and then write a short definition for each. We would check these answers as a class before moving on to the reading exercise.
Students would be given a “gist” question to ponder while reading, designed to ensure they understood the main idea of the article. This could be something using one or two of the key financial terms discussed in the “Warm-Up” or “Vocabulary Preview” section, something like: “How did credit and debt create The Great Depression?” The students would then read the article in pairs and brainstorm a short answer to the question together. Once all the pairs had finished, we would compare our answers as a class, and elicit other key components of the article such as “What happened as a result of The Great Depression?”. Since these would be advanced students, this portion of the lesson should be fairly brief.
The language relating to the cognitive metaphors in the text would be highlighted according to the color system laid out in the previous section, and key words being used metaphorically would be underlined. I would only draw attention to this after the students had completed the first reading and we had discussed the answer to the “gist” question. The text of the reading passage would look something like the following:
On October 29, 1929, the US Stock Market crashed. Many investors owed more money than they had earned. International trade quickly began to fall.
The color-coding and underlining is designed to help students recognize conceptual patterns within the language, and correlates to the organization of the following “Language Analysis” activity (which would be on the next page). Students would be given phrases from the text grouped according to the cognitive metaphors they evoke, but without the names of the metaphors. It would look something like this:
Group 1: overproduction, unemployment reached 25%, keep prices high, keep wages high
Group 2: economic decline, market crashed, trade began to fall, economic downturn, prices fell, GDP fell
Group 3: hurt economies, relief and recovery, banks suffered
In pairs, students would answer the following questions:
What do the words and expressions in each group mean? (You can use the reading passage to help you).
What do the expressions in each group have in common? (Use the underlined words to help you).
Focus on the underlined words (or parts of words). In what other contexts or situations might we use these words?
E.g. We can use the word “crashed” to talk about a car, plane, bicycle, or other type of vehicle getting into an accident.
The purpose of this activity is not to get students to produce the exact cognitive metaphors (like MORE IS UP), but rather to help them simply notice and identify the conceptual patterns: Group 1 relates to “HIGH” or “UP,” Group 2 relates to “LOW” or “DOWN,” and Group 3 relates to “THE BODY” and “ILLNESS.” This activity brings students’ awareness to the underlying conceptual structure that informs the language about the economy, and see common polysemous words--whose literal meanings they are already quite familiar with--being used metaphorically. The most common words in English (and other languages) are the most polysemous, yet most ESL instructional material rarely if ever addresses these non-literal senses, especially not in the context of their conceptual structure. This type of activity would therefore be a new experience for many students, and has the potential to fill gaps in their understanding in a novel way.
After the pairs finish that activity we would go over the answers as a class, perhaps having a brief discussion about “the economy,” and whether it is talked about as “a body” in their language, or something else. (Considering the metaphors of their own language and seeing whether they are the same as English or other languages in the room is part of building students’ meta-linguistic awareness--the ultimate goal of the lesson.)
Question (3) would be checked by eliciting a few answers from each group. Talking about other contexts and situations in which we can use the underlined words would function as a nice transition into the next activity. While in question (3) students likely produced literal senses of words that collocate with the target vocabulary (e.g. the bike crashed, the man suffered, etc) they will now need to try to produce correct collocations (with the metaphorical sense in mind). Students would be presented with an activity like the following:
What words can fit in these collocations? Try to create metaphorical expressions, not literal expressions.
Keep ____ high
Over__________
_______ suffered
_______fell / declined
_______reached 50%
As with any activity, if students were a little stumped to begin with I would offer a few examples (e.g. “overeating,” “my grades suffered,” etc) and then leave them to come up with their own examples in pairs. After the pairs had finished all or most of the collocations, we would review them as a class, and talk about which ones work, which ones don’t, and why. This would likely lead to a deeper discussion of the conceptual metaphors involved, and some clarifying of the difference between literal and metaphoric senses (e.g. “My dog suffered” is a literal expression, because “my dog” is a living being that can experience and react to suffering; “my grades suffered” is a metaphorical expression because “my grades” is an abstract concept that has no capacity to experience suffering).
Provided the rest of the activity had gone well, I would give students the opportunity to address the extra metaphor: STATES ARE CONTAINERS. I would ask students to identify which of the financial terms from the warm-up is similar to “depression.” After eliciting the answer, “recession,” I would again pull up the picture of the physical “depression” in the earth that we saw in the warm-up activity, and project it onto the board along with the relevant quote from the article: “pull the US out of recession.” With the students’ knowledge of FAILURE or ILLNESS being down, and THE ECONOMY being A BODY, they should be able to arrive at the conclusion that a physical depression = a physically low place, and an economic recession = a place of failure / illness to the economy. I would ask students leading questions in a group discussion to arrive at this conclusion. Students would then be asked to produce other contexts or situations in which we can use the verb pull and the prepositional phrase out of. Students would probably provide literal expressions “pull a tissue out of a box.” Projecting pictures of some of these on the board could help us arrive at the concept of “containment” that structures the way we talk about “the recession.”
Finally, it would be useful to dedicate the last few minutes of class to some student feedback and reflection. I would project a few questions on the board such as:
“Did you like today’s lesson? What did you learn? How was it different than other English lessons you’ve attended in the past? Do you think these exercises could help you approach new vocabulary in a new way?” Students would share their ideas with their partners and then with the rest of the class in a wrap-up discussion. This activity is designed to get students thinking about how they can carry conceptual-level thinking into their other classes, and even their everyday lives.
