Implications for foreign language learning

We are unaware of any research studies on promoting the ability to interpret cultural references and figures of speech through the use of

figurative thinking in L2 contexts. However, one way in which it could be done is through the use of poetry. It has been argued that poetry, as well as literature and song lyrics can act as a powerful change agent by developing language learners’ intercultural awareness while at the same time nurturing empathy, a tolerance for diversity and even emotional intelligence (Ghosn, 2002). Furthermore, crossing the language/ literature divide in the language classroom is likely to help learners to appreciate the more poetic elements of everyday language (Carter and McCarthy, 1995). Poetry allows the teacher to expand metaphorical themes in different contexts. Modern poetry can help language learners gain insights into the target language culture, and much poetry, whether modern or not, aids discussion of the relationship between universal and culture-specific themes. By discussing how the metaphorical themes are developed in a particular poem, language learners can be helped to get a feel for the different ways in which conceptual metaphors are elaborated in the target language. They might then be encouraged to consider the extent to which these elaborations would work in their own languages, and whether different elaborations might be more appropriate.

A poem that makes extensive use of metonymy, providing access to a range of aspects of British or American culture is Auden’s (1936) ‘Funeral Blues’. In it, the narrator protests that everything in the world should stop because his lover has died. It may also be satirical in origin, being sarcastic about the public funeral of a politician.³ The poem draws heavily on the cultural connotations of words, a fact which could be heavily exploited in the language classroom.

Put crepe bows round the white necks of the public doves [7]

Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves [8]

To understand line 8, students could be asked to note their associations with ‘black’ and to describe their image of a traffic policeman. They could then understand how in British culture, black not white is the primary symbol of mourning. A similar exercise (‘Who would wear a crepe bow?’,

‘What do you associate with doves? With white doves?’) would get at the greater complexity of line 7, with its echoes of the black and white of (Victorian?) funeral parades, pigeons as stereotypically associated with public places and the dove as the Christian incarnation of the Holy Spirit or the soul, as well as a common symbol for love until death.

Learners could also be asked to identify metaphors and metonymies that are likely to be universal, but which are expressed in different ways

in their language. For instance, ‘Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone’ (line 1) expresses both the feeling on numbness at the loss and the habit of publicly remembering the dead with a few minutes silence. Time (in the form of the sun or a clock) stopping to mark a deeply significant event has been a conventional literary conceit for thousands of years in western European culture (from the Bible, through the Song of Roland in the Middle Ages), but it is likely to be expressed differently in languages with different cultural connections.

Finally, learners could be asked to work out which metaphors and metonymies in the poem are conventional in English, and which represent novel extensions or creations by the author. Even inter-mediate level learners could consider the metonymic implications of substituting ‘doves’ for ‘pigeons’, or using ‘telephone’ as an image of happiness, noise and sociability. Such activities would provide learners with an opportunity to develop their associative fluency and analogical reasoning skills.

A useful source of material that could be exploited in order to explore the boundaries between conventional and creative metaphor is cartoons. Forceville (2005) shows how ANGER IS HEAT OF A FLUID IN A CONTAINER is creatively exploited in Asterix comics. Pictorial signals of anger include bulging eyes (presumably representing a build-up of interior pressure), a tightly closed mouth (presumably to prevent the anger from escaping), and smoke or steam coming out of the ears (presumably representing the ultimate evaporation of the fluid). These car-toons could be shown to students, who might then be asked to describe the scenes verbally. This would give rise to a variety of conventional and novel metaphors for anger. It might also be useful to encourage them to look up words such as explode, steam, burst, and so on, in a large corpus, such as the Bank of English or the British National Corpus.

A final source of authentic material for the analysis of cultural references is advertising. This is because, in advertisements, several messages often have to be conveyed as concisely as possible, meaning that the metaphors they use are often multi-layered. We saw in Chapter 3 how the wording of a beer advertisement ‘Boddingtons: The Cream of Manchester’ posed problems to a group of Japanese learners of English. Students could be encouraged to discuss with their teacher the many connotations ‘cream’ might have, such as: its texture, the fact that it usually refers to the best, it comes at the top, is pure and wholesome, and so on. They might be asked to identify the different possible interpretations, and consider the different audiences at which they might be aimed. They might then go on to think of other ways in which

the word might be used, thus developing their metaphoric extension abilities. In short, advertisements such as this can provide a rich source of teaching material designed to sensitise learners to cultural differences in association patterns.

5.4 The relationship between figurative