Publications

Publication details [#10427]

Stokes, Roberta. 1995. The metaphors they become literate by: Peer tutors as undergraduate readers and writers. Madison, Wisc.. 213 pp.

Abstract

The study's purpose was to discover and to consider the literacy metaphors that underpin the reading and writing beliefs and practices of 17 highly literate undergraduates, who maintained three roles concurrently during the semester-long study: (1) as students in a practicum course designed to prepare them to tutor their peers in reading and writing, (2) as tutors in the university's tutorial center, and (3) as tutor-researchers in part of the study. The teacher-researcher co-taught the practicum course and supervised the tutorial sessions. Within a social constructionist frame, the teacher-researcher employed interpretive methodology with three data-gathering strategies; the collected tutor metaphors were counted, categorized, and compared and contrasted across the tutor group; six tutors' cover metaphors (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980; Munby, 1986) were profiled and comparisons and contrasts drawn among them. The study revealed that without prompts for metaphors 16 of the 17 Practicum tutors employed metaphors for reading and writing in both their speech and writing. As a group, tutors varied both in the numbers and kinds of their reading and writing metaphors. Overall, tutors used many beingness (ontological) and structural metaphors than orientational ones (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980). Metaphors that tutors shared included, for example: reading and writing as work, as a container, as a conduit (Reddy, 1982), as flow, as dry, and as weak or strong. Examples of writing cover metaphors included Throwing Ideas Across the Passage, Getting Over the Barrier, and Hard Labor; for reading, Crossing the Bridge to the Good Life, Taking Out the Treasures, and Climbing Into the Text. The study's methodology and findings have implications for teachers who recognize that in order to assist students in becoming more successful readers and writers, that they could profitably identify their students' individual beliefs about literacy. Since an individual's reading and writing metaphors offer a window into his or her literacy beliefs, teachers may wish to collaborate with their students in order to discover what respective student literacy metaphors may be, and whether these metaphors work for or against student development as evolving readers and writers. (Dissertation Abstracts)