ALIS Newsletter - September 2014 (Plain Text Version)

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In this issue:
Leadership Updates
•  FROM THE EDITORS
•  FROM THE CHAIR
•  FROM THE CHAIR-ELECT
Articles
•  I NEVER METAPHOR I DIDN'T LIKE
•  INTERCULTURAL AWARENESS FOR YOUNG LEARNERS
•  PRACTICAL WAYS TO BUILD INTERCULTURAL COMPETENCE IN YOUNG LEARNERS
•  DIGITAL STORIES AS INTERCULTURAL TEXTS: THE AFRICAN STORYBOOK PROJECT AND YOUNG LEARNERS
•  WHY GESTURE!
•  WHAT IS INTERACTIONAL COMPETENCE?
ABOUT THIS COMMUNITY
•  WHO'S WHO FOR 2014

Articles

I NEVER METAPHOR I DIDN'T LIKE

Robert B. Kaplan, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, California, USA

Teachers need to know about metaphors. The way metaphors color perceptions across different perspectives constitutes a subject about which language teachers need to know a great deal more than they do. Let's start with metaphors; what are they? A metaphor is a figure of speech in which an implied comparison is made between two unlike things that actually have something in common. For example: Her teeth are like stars; they come out at night. Metaphors are not merely shorthand for facts; rather, they simplify complex reality by situating facts within cultural meaning, thereby giving them significance. A metaphor is not merely a rhetorical embellishment; rather, a metaphor drives a particular vision of the world as well as the way that vision should be. A metaphor is not merely a trick of language; rather it is an incentive for people to act on the world in a particular way and to develop certain capacities rather than others. By fixing certain concepts within a technology, a given metaphor locks an interpretation into a particular set of views. Each metaphoric representation accepts some point of view and dismisses another. As Richard Young (1993) argues, "Paradigms . . . are only a scientized form of metaphor and are consequently more acceptable to the academic community" (p. 158). Metaphors are culturally constrained.

ESL writing specialists have had a great deal to say about technical writing and the development of language-for-special-purposes writing (Swales, 2000). Technical groups are formed by adherence to a particular, distinctive lexicon. To the extent that these groups are committed to their special codes, they may not realize how much the metaphors informing their agenda reproduce a particular social context. Traditionally, scholars have understood that the purpose of their communication is intended to remedy deficits in the public's knowledge. They do so through the use of a number of different kinds of metaphors:

• Conduit metaphors assume that communication is a matter of transmission. Communication involves inserting ideas and emotions as objects into words and expressions (conceiving words and expressions as containers) and then transmitting them along a conduit to someone, who understands by removing the objects and emotions from their containers.
• Feedback metaphors codify predominately cultural value assumptions, consequently, as a result, affecting the core values of technical inquiry and therefore determining how research proceeds within a given technical field.

Now let me take the metaphor progress as an example. It is necessary to distinguish Progress fromprogress, the latter of which brings diverse forms together to constitute a metaphoric cluster founded on polysemy—that is, on the association of one word with two or more distinct meanings. Such forms of progress highlight the metaphorical functions of progress, and they define the individual's ability to reach various sectors of human experience, illustrating the way metaphors are adopted and used in social contexts.

• Progressive metaphors demonstrate not only how metaphors refer to one thing in terms of another, but also show how they may transfer meanings across discourses.
• Scientific metaphors travel among and between scholarly disciplines. Progress—initially derived from Latin progressus—defining the domain of forward movement, leading to use of the term in the sense of a journey or a march, without necessarily implying a goal. Eventually, the word came to be applied to a series of events leading to a better outcome. Progress has become linked with teleology—with the idea that there are natural tendencies toward certain end conditions—together with the idea of improvement. Most recently, it has been expanded further to describe political views in which progressive may be opposed to conservative.

Thus, metaphors do much more than just extend old lexical meanings to new objects; rather, metaphors constitute ways in which societies construct webs of collective meaning, that, once built, become the centers from which reason and action emerge. Progress exemplifies the metaphoric web, constrained by a permeable boundary between cultural and technological domains; for examples, technological progress may be subsumed by scholarly progress, economic progress by cultural progress, and religious progress by spiritual progress. In the Anglo-European culture, individuals want to see that

their incomes will grow,
their knowledge and skills will improve,
their lives will get better,
their papers will be published,
their careers will unfold,
their experiments will work,
their research will contribute to something.

However, there are cultures in which this metaphor simply does not exist. To illustrate,

Humpty Dumpty, in Through the Looking-Glass, enlightens us: "When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said, in a rather scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean, neither more nor less."
"The question is," said Alice, "whether you can make words mean so many different things."
"The question is," said Humpty Dumpty, "which is to be master—that's all."

Specialist communities—teachers, lawyers, chemists, plumbers, and so on—are formed by adherence to a particular, distinctive lexicon. To the extent that these groups are committed to their special codes, they may not realize how much the metaphors informing the core of their agenda reproduce a particular social context. To a large extent, the inevitable fossilization of metaphors can be attributed to the widespread distribution of printed language.

The global distribution of English is the reason ESL/EFL teachers have employment. The spread of English has also meant the spread of English metaphors. As Robertson (1998) suggests, civilization is information, and civilizations are limited more by lack of information than by lack of physical resources. Limitations on information restrict the number of things a society knows how to do.

The Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London constituted the first "public institution for the pursuit of scientific research" (Atkinson, 1999, p.16; italics in the original). As much as facilitating the spread of English, those publications (produced continuously over more than 300 years) facilitated the diffusion of empirical research as well as the rhetoric in which such research could be reported, including the metaphors that enhance the understanding of science. The language one uses is shaped by the society in which one lives; that society is shaped by the language used by the speakers who inhabit the society—ergo, those who control the language exercise social control by focusing on particular ideas. Metaphors play an incredibly important role in shaping the worldview.

Consider the ways that English structures the world:

1. English individualizes and permits individualization of mass nouns (e.g., a glass of water, a cup of coffee); in English mass nouns constitute measurable categories (e.g., a liter of water, a gallon of coffee). Such a system fragments the idea that all water (or any other substance) constitutes a unity. People think of water in the kitchen sink as separate from water in the ocean; consequently, it becomes difficult to understand water pollution.
2. English allows two types of countable nouns—real and imaginary—even though some occupy space (e.g., rock, car, gun) while others are metaphorical (e.g., beauty, evil, delight). This phenomenon makes experience measurable, even though in reality not everything can (or needs to) be countable.
3. English relies on a three-tense conception of time, objectifying time and making it linear; each unit is equal to all other comparable units (e.g., seconds, hours). This system extends infinitely into the past and into the future. Such noun units can be counted and pluralized, permitting them to become aggregates. Such a structure permits speakers to see things rather than processes.

The English-language worldview reinforces scientific realism. As the boundary between the literal and the metaphorical is language-specific, and as access to reality in technologies is achieved mainly by means of metaphor, the result makes it possible to ignore non-Western metaphor systems (Műhlhȁusler, 2003).

Some folks say that teaching is essentially about questioning the status quo; however, questioning the status quo inevitably means questioning cultural orthodoxy. Academics have identified a number of continually expanding problems for which technological solutions are sought because technologists believe that they can manage solution—provide answers—implying that managerial framing is reliant on technology and that such managerial framing remains unquestioned. As a result, three limiting constraints appear to be in operation:

• First, this process trivializes or simply omits the public's participation (even though the public may be the first sector to recognize the existence of a problem).
• Second, it inflates the role of technology, assuming that, if all the pieces of a problem can be described, solutions to the problem will emerge.
• Third, managerialism leads to a conflict between competing interests; i.e., management constitutes a metaphor defining a culture controlled by experts.

In problem solving, the preferred managerial control consists of mechanistic and reductionist approaches. A dichotomy between technology and society emerges—technology deals with solid facts; society deals with fuzzy individual and cultural preference. The English language magnifies and reifies this distinction, resulting in the operation of a subject-object framework, while prohibiting the occurrence of a subject-object framework. Given the metaphors in use, an ethics based on egocentrism and anthropomorphism becomes likely. Metaphors require particular practices and behaviors; the way such practices and behaviors influence human relationship should not be ignored. Rationality consists in the continuous adaptation of our language to our continually expanding world, and metaphor is one of the chief means by which this is accomplished.

Now, it is impossible for a language to be dominant; rather, speakers of so-called dominant languages are responsible for the perception of dominance. The ascendancy of English in science and technology is, then, the result of a series of accidents occurring over the past half century (Kaplan, 2001), though the roots of those accidents reach back historically over more than three hundred years. As Gal and Irvine (1995, p. 968) noted, "our conceptual tools for understanding linguistic differences still derive from [the] massive scholarly attempt to create the political differentiation of Europe," because the fledgling academic fields of anthropology and linguistics emerged during that epoch developing at the end of the 19th century and in the early years of the 20th century, when the legitimating of discrete national states was an intellectual project of vast perceived importance and equally great practical consequences—in short, at the moment when the one-nation/one-language myth was born. The metaphor progress briefly discussed here has had a role in language planning (especially in its relation to language teaching) as it has had a role in the widening understanding of the biological environment.

I have long felt that schools of education spend far too much time on abstract notions of what it takes to be a teacher and inadequate time on the subject matter that the prospective teacher will teach. In other words, schools and bodies of students are replete with generalists and seriously lacking in subject experts. You are gathered here in the belief that teaching English as a second/foreign language is a specialism.

If I have bored you, it is merely because I wanted to put appropriate emphasis on such things as metaphors which are inevitably culturally bound, and also to show how the metaphors that some of us learned with our mothers' milk are fashioned by the English language and the English language is constrained and shaped by its speakers as those speakers are defined by the language. In trying to teach a language to students from another culture, it is essential for insipient teachers to be aware of the ways in which the target language has been shaped by its speakers and that speakers of some other language, equally, have been shaped by their first languages; the learners are unfamiliar with the shape of metaphors in the target language. If the teachers are unaware of the gap thus created, teaching becomes an unnecessarily difficult undertaking. No one can teach the total contents of the metaphoric system, but the well qualified must make the learners aware of the problem they face and the ways in which they can begin to bridge the gap. The defining features of a good metaphor become acutely important for discussions of the metaphorical effects on reasoning and understanding of social policy issues. Your brain's activity in one part of the day shapes your understanding in another, especially when it comes to creating text. This is a real phenomenon, described by psycholinguists, who call it structural priming or syntactic persistence. Basically, earlier patterns of what you say or read or write prime you to repeat those patterns when you are acting automatically. Our words and sentence patterns are primed so that the words we chose now are the words we will choose later. If you write now Kevin gave Sally a pen, you are more likely later to write John sent Tim the files than you are to write John sent the files to Tim. Reflective practice is, as Donald Schȍn (1983) puts it, "the capacity to reflect on action so as to engage in a process of continuous learning." Reflective practice in education refers to the ability of an educator to study his or her own teaching methods (including consideration of the ethical consequences of those methods) andto determine what works best for the students. The content of reflective practice must be rooted in a deep understanding of the language to be taught—far more than word order and basic grammar, and far more than vocabulary and parts of speech. As Nils Eric Enkvist (1997, p. 199) noted:

Giving a sentence its textual fit, its conformity with the text strategy, is not a cosmetic surface operation polishing the sentence after it is already there. Textual fit is a far more basic requirement, determining the choice of words as well as the syntactic structure of a sentence. To modern text and discourse linguists this is so obvious that it seems curious that grammarians and teachers of composition have, through the centuries, spent so much time and effort on syntactic phenomena within individual sentences, while overlooking the fundamental questions of text strategy and information flow. It is the text strategy and the information flow that actually determine which of the available syntactic and lexical structures a . . . writer will choose in each particular instance.

In other words, a metaphor cannot be translated word by word; consider these examples:

• He's a couch potato.
• John's suggestion was only a Band-Aid.
• Love is the wild card of existence.
• America is like Lunchables.
• Cervical lymph node is a garbage dump.

I would argue that simply translating the words in these metaphors into languages other than English would not make them comprehensible. The key words require special knowledge—they can be explained, but they cannot simply be translated. Some years ago (Kaplan, Touchstone, & Hagstrom, 1995), a group of my students and I looked at the use of translation of banking procedures from English into Mexican Spanish by Los Angeles banks; it was a disaster, in part because banking terminology in the two languages is not identical, but more importantly because the clientele the banks were attempting to reach had little or no familiarity with banking in general.

In sum, as Enkvist puts it, textual fit is critical, and textual fit depends at least in part on metaphors and other linguistic devices rarely addressed in ESL classes. That being so, courses intended to train insipient teacher should, perhaps, be revised so that these matters could in fact be addressed, thereby increasing the probability of success.

References

Atkinson, D. (1999). Scientific discourse in sociohistorical context: The philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London, 1675–1975. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.

Enkvist, N. E. (1997). Why we need contrastive rhetoric. Alternation, 4(1), 188–206.

Gal, S., & Irvine, J. T. (1995). The boundaries of languages and disciplines: How ideologies construct difference. Social Research, 62, 967–1001.

Kaplan, R. B. (2001). English—The accidental language of science? In U. Ammon (Ed.), The dominance of English as a language of science: Effects on other language communities (pp. 3–28). Berlin, Germany: Mouton de Gruyter.

Kaplan, R. B., Touchstone, E. E., & Hagstrom, C. L. (1995). Image and reality: Banking in Los Angeles. Text, 15, 427–457.

Műhlhȁusler, P. (2003). Language of environment, environment of language: A course in ecolinguistics. London, England: Battlebridge.

Robertson, D. S. (1998). The new renaissance: Computers and the next level of civilization. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press.

Schȍn, D. (1983). The reflective practitioner: How professionals think in action. London, England: Temple Smith.

Swales, J. M. (2000). Languages for specific purposes. In W. Grabe et al. (Eds.), Annual review of applied linguistics: Vol. 20. Applied linguistics as an emerging discipline (pp. 59–76). New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.

Young, R. M. (1993). Darwin's metaphor and the philosophy of science. Science as Culture, 3, 375–403.

These remarks are largely based on Michael Erard, "Escaping One's Own Shadow"; Brendon Larson, Metaphors for Environmental Sustainability: Redefining our Relationship With Nature; and an unpublished review of a book proposal from a major publisher.

Robert Kaplan is Emeritus Professor of Applied Linguistics at the University of Southern California. He has authored over 100 articles in the field of language learning, was the founding editor of the Annual Review of Applied Linguistics, and served as the President of TESOL (1989-1990) and AAAL (1993-1994). He can be reached at: rkaplan@olypen.com.