Article published in:
Elicited Metaphor Analysis in Educational Discourse
Edited by Wan Wan and Graham Low
[Metaphor in Language, Cognition, and Communication 3] 2015
► pp. 189–212

Researching academic literacy metaphors

Development and use of the modified “What was school like?” elicitation instrument

| University of Kansas, Department of Curriculum & Teaching
| 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.

Keywords: conceptualizations of literacy, educational research, elicited metaphor, literacy metaphors, metaphor, metaphor instrument
Published online: 02 July 2015
https://doi.org/10.1075/milcc.3.08sha
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