Difficulties in Metaphor Comprehension Faced by International Students whose First Language is not English

Learning Portuguese as a Second Language

“…On the other hand, it has had some followers in terms of research since the eighties (Irujo, 1986), who focused on the influence of L1-L2 similarity, up to the most recent studies (Laufer, 2000;Liao & Fukuya, 2004;Littlemore Chen, Koester et al, 2011), when compared with the intervention of other variables such as nationality or country of origin as an explanation of the meaning of metaphors and immigrant students' difficulty in understanding them (Boers & Demecheleer, 2001;Boers, Demecheleer, & Eyckmans, 2004). On the other hand, it has had some followers in terms of research since the eighties (Irujo, 1986), who focused on the influence of L1-L2 similarity, up to the most recent studies (Laufer, 2000;Liao & Fukuya, 2004;Littlemore Chen, Koester et al, 2011), when compared with the intervention of other variables such as nationality or country of origin as an explanation of the meaning of metaphors and immigrant students' difficulty in understanding them (Boers & Demecheleer, 2001;Boers, Demecheleer, & Eyckmans, 2004).…”

Cross-cultural variation in deliberate metaphor interpretation

“…For the international students, the exercise amounted to a challenging task to make sense of a new, hitherto unknown expression in English as their L2/3 and/or Lingua Franca. Research on the use of figurative language in ESL and ELF contexts (Littlemore et al, 2011;MacArthur et al, 2013;Nacey, 2013;Philip, 2010;Piquer-Piriz, 2010;Wang & Dowker, 2010) has provided ample evidence that wrongly understood metaphors are an obstacle to vocabulary acquisition and also an important factor in teacher-student miscommunication. In the case of our class-test, it would be too strong to speak of 'miscommunication'; after all, all responses made good sense as successful solutions of the exercise task (Musolff, 2014).…”

Applying Cognitive Linguistics

“…In fact, this article is one of the first pieces of work arising from EuroCoAT (the European Corpus of Academic Talk), a corpus specifically designed to analyse metaphor in academic conversation. Starting from previous research on the topic that had shown that lecturers often use metaphorical language (Beger, 2011;Low et al, 2008;among others) and, furthermore, that this language can prove to be extremely challenging for international students who often misinterpret these metaphors (Littlemore, Chen, Barnden, & Koester, 2011), MacArthur concentrates on an underexplored area, i.e. officehour consultations, and focuses specifically on how ideas are framed metaphorically by the lecturers and the responses these ideas produced on the students.…”