The Role Of Metaphors In Communication

In communication, people do their best to make the hearer or reader understand the message correctly, and the message should be formulated in such a way that it achieves the purpose. An abstract concept such as bravery, for example, may be understood better if it is described using a concrete thing such as a lion, as it is easier for people to imagine a lion than bravery. Saying he is brave, and he is a lion would give different perceptions. Another example is describing corruption. To say literally that corruption is increasing and involving all levels of society is simply informative, but using the nonliteral expression corruption is an octopus enables people to imagine the situation vividly. The word metaphor is derived from the Greek μεταφορά

Metaphors were used to refer to immigrants (Anna, 1999),and to indicate social change in society (Amouzadeh and Tavangar, 2004). Metaphors were also used in various fields such as in American presidential speeches, press reporting, financial reporting and religious discourse (Charteris – Black, 2004). In the field of education, metaphors dealing with teaching, learning and language were investigated (Cortazzi and Jin,1999; Littlemore and Koester, 2008). In relation to the other kinds of figurative language, such as irony and hyperbole, metaphor becomes problems in language teaching compared with the other kinds of figurative language (Littlemore and Low, 2006). If metaphor becomes one of the everyday aspects of communication, language learners should be able to comprehend and to produce it. Danesi (1992) argues that one of the reasons of the learners’ failure in communicating like native speakers although they have studied English for years is their lack of metaphorical competence. Cameron and Low (1999) state that the teaching of metaphor is very important, and learners should have metaphoric competence to make them communicate like native speakers. In this case, it is necessary to know the learners’ present metaphoric competence in order to find out the best way to teach or encourage learners to use

Boers (2000b), related the learners’ metaphor comprehension to learners’ cognitive styles; Kintsch and Bowl (2002) and Tang and Yue (2009) conducted research on metaphor comprehension only.
In her research Littlemore (2001) used the term fluency of metaphoric interpretation, ability to find meaning in metaphor; speed in finding meaning in metaphor to refer to metaphor comprehension. majoring in English at the level of intermediate and upper intermediate learners (who spent more than 8 years learning English). She interviewed learners and evaluated their English competence, by considering their ability in discussing an issue. The results showed that the metaphor comprehension did not relate to students’ English proficiency in