Teaching is like being on a stage: a cross-genre analysis of the use of deliberate metaphors in L1 and L2 Spanish writing

Cuberos Vicente, Rocio [UCL] De Cock, Barbara [UCL] Suner Munoz, Ferran [UCL]

This presentation details a corpus-based study into the written production of linguistic metaphors in L1 and L2 Spanish in two different genres: narrative and argumentative texts. As an essential component of the overall communicative competence, metaphors have received much attention over the past few years especially because they have been found to favour vocabulary learning as well as grammar acquisition and pragmatic competence (Littlemore & Low, 2006). To date, language learning research has primarily focused on metaphor comprehension, while much less work has been devoted to investigating the production of metaphors in L2. These studies have observed that the ability to produce metaphors develops steadily as L2 proficiency increases (Cuberos, Rosado, & Perera, 2019; Nacey, 2019; 2023), that learners, just as native speakers, tend to produce metaphors in clusters, especially at advanced stages of learning (Littlemore et al., 2014), and that metaphors serve different communicative functions at each level of competence (Littlemore et al., 2014; Lu, 2021). However, little is known about the influence of genre on L2 metaphorical production. By comparing metaphorical production across narrative and argumentative genres, this study seeks to reveal differences in writing performance regarding the use of metaphors that result from genre-specific language demands faced by learners and native speakers. One main aim is thus to measure how overall metaphor density varies per genre. A second aim is to assess the ways in which the use of metaphors contributes to perform (different) communicative functions in the two focal genres. This research examines the deliberate written production of conventional, creative and transferred metaphors in 44 written texts (22 essays; 22 narratives) collected from 11 advanced French-speaking learners of Spanish and 11 native speakers. The corpus was collected in guided-learning contexts at the Université catholique de Louvain and the Universitat de Barcelona. Metaphors were identified using the Metaphor Identification Procedure Vrije Universiteit (MIPVU, Steen et al., 2010) and deliberate metaphors by applying the Deliberate Metaphor Identification Procedure (DMIP, Reijnierse et al., 2018). Guidelines of both procedures were adapted to L2 production to examine creativity and transfer (Cuberos et al., 2019). Metaphor functions were identified using Halliday’s (1985) framework of three meta-functions of language: ideational, interpersonal and textual functions. The results show that deliberate metaphors are essential in both L1 and L2 production, although their use depends on (individual) writing styles. Metaphorical transfer seems to work unconsciously and to be attributable to inadvertent errors that come across as creative uses. However, learners actively engage in language manipulation to generate innovative metaphors, even more than native speakers. Results also point that the use of metaphors in the two genre differs not in the metaphorical density but in its communicative functions. In this sense, the functions of metaphors are intertwined and contribute to achieving genre-specific communicative goals. The results are discussed in relation to pedagogical implications and directions for future research.