Metaphor Comprehension and Engineering texts: Implications for English for Academic Purpose (EAP) and First-year University Student Success

Abstract

One of the challenges that students face during the transition from high school to university is mastering discipline-specific academic expectations and norms. From a language perspective, they may encounter new academic and disciplinary vocabulary, some of which will be metaphoric in nature. However, some students whose first language is not English may struggle, as metaphoric competence is not often a consideration in ESL/EAP classrooms (Littlemore & Low, 2006). Among the supports that postsecondary institutions have implemented to improve students’ chances of success are diagnostic and post-entry language assessment (Read, 2016). This mixed methods study investigated the comprehension of metaphoric language in first-year engineering reading materials using diagnostic assessment. First, a corpus of first-year engineering texts was qualitatively explored, finding personification and family/relationship metaphors. Subsequently, a metaphor comprehension test was designed using content from the corpus and administered as a reading task in an existing diagnostic assessment for first-year engineering students. Descriptive statistics, correlations, and t-test analysis of the responses revealed that English first-language (L1) students outperformed English second/additional (L2) language students. Further, those who performed poorly on the diagnostic assessment tended to also struggle with the metaphor comprehension task. Implications are discussed for EAP and first-year university classrooms.
 
 Un des défis auxquels les étudiants font face lors de la transition entre l’école secondaire et l’université est la maîtrise des attentes et des normes universitaires propres à chaque discipline. Du point de vue de la langue, il se peut qu’ils rencontrent du vocabulaire nouveau lié à l’université et à une discipline, dont une partie sera de nature métaphorique. Cependant, certains étudiants, dont la première langue n’est pas l’anglais, peuvent éprouver des difficultés, puisque la compétence métaphorique n’est pas souvent prise en considération dans les cours d’ALS/EAP (cours d’anglais académique) (Littlemore & Low, 2006). Parmi les soutiens que les institutions postsecondaires ont mis en place pour améliorer les chances de réussite des étudiants, on trouve des évaluations langagières diagnostiques après l’admission à l’université (Read, 2016). Cette étude, à l’aide de diverses méthodes, a enquêté sur la compréhension du langage métaphorique dans les ouvrages de lecture de première année d’ingénierie en utilisant une évaluation diagnostique. Tout d’abord, on a évalué la qualité d’un corpus de textes d’ingénierie de première année pour y trouver des métaphores liées à la personnification, à la famille et aux relations. Par la suite, on a conçu un test de compréhension des métaphores tirées du corpus et on l’a administré comme une tâche de lecture dans un test d’évaluation diagnostique déjà existant pour les étudiants en première année d’ingénierie. Des statistiques descriptives, des corrélations et une analyse test-t des réponses ont révélé que les étudiants dont la première langue était l’anglais (L1) avaient mieux réussi que les étudiants dont l’anglais était la seconde langue ou la langue supplémentaire (L2). De plus, ceux qui n’avaient pas obtenu de bons résultats au test diagnostique, avaient aussi eu des difficultés dans la partie de compréhension des métaphores. On discute des implications pour les cours d’anglais académique et les cours de première année d’université.

Metaphoring back in the climate crisis

“…Before we can discuss student use of generative metaphor, or metaphoring, we need to know which metaphors are important framing device within a course, and how students understand and make use of those metaphors. Beynen (2020) uses corpus analysis to capture some of the metaphors used in a course and analyzes metaphor comprehension in students, finding some preliminary evidence that metaphor comprehension ability is predictive of performance in the course. Though her study looks at additional language users explicitly, the specificity of engineering discourse-and the differences between it and high school-level academic and everyday English-suggests that fluent English users may also struggle to comprehend the metaphors used to teach key concepts in engineering courses.…”

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“…In addition to language and power issues more broadly, I became interested in the understanding (or lack thereof) of English metaphors by those learning English as a second or additional language and wondered how any non-or misunderstanding might impact English proficiency testing (e.g., Littlemore, 2001;Littlemore et al, 2011). This inspired the master's research that I undertook investigating comprehension of English metaphors in first-year university engineering reading material using diagnostic assessment (Beynen, 2020). And finally, the diagnostic assessment project I was introduced to during my master's studies (Fox, Haggerty, & Artemeva, 2016;Fox, von Randow, & Volkov, 2016) acquainted me with the transition to university research context in which I undertook the pilot study during the first part of my doctoral studies.…”

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