This book reports research into metaphor in use with school students. It is one of the first studies of metaphor to investigate the phenomenon in contextualised discourse, to adopt a socio-cultural approach to metaphor and to introduce the relatively new science of complex dynamic systems which offers new and potentially fruitful analogies for the analysis of educational discourse.
The setting for the research is a UK school and the participants are around 10 years old, with their first language well established but still developing concepts and understandings. Close examination of a corpus of classroom spoken discourse reveals how metaphor is employed by their teachers, not just in explaining ideas, but, , in managing and mediating the activity of the classroom and the learning of the students.
The use and interpretation of metaphor is discussed in terms of human interaction, understanding and learning. Metaphor is seen to be a multi-faceted tool in language use, at once continuous with other ways of talking, yet with the potential to be dramatically and deliberately different. Siting the research in real discourse has required the development of new metaphor theory and research methodology - particular issues discussed include: the problems of identifying metaphors in spoken discourse, the conventionalisation of metaphors in the discourse of socio-cultural groups, and how a socio-cultural approach can account for systematicity in metaphor use.