Researching academic literacy metaphors
Development and use of the modified “What was school like?” elicitation instrument
Donita Shaw | University of Kansas, Department of Curriculum & Teaching
Marc Mahlios | University of Kansas, Department of Curriculum & Teaching
The particular interest of the researchers has been to identify the dominant metaphorical views of literacy. We begin the chapter by introducing and describing a content-valid instrument for collecting school and life metaphors that has a long research history with cross-cultural populations and established validity. Next, we synthesize three research studies on literacy metaphors and through these studies we show our process of revising a portion of the aforementioned instrument for academic literacy. Finally we discuss conceptualizations of literacy. Specifically we align each literacy metaphor with a literacy theory and then we discuss how these conceptualizations apply to the field of adult literacy. Implications for future literacy metaphor research are provided.