THE EFFECTIVENESS OF USING METAPHORS IN ESL TEACHING

THE EFFECTIVENESS OF USING METAPHORS IN ESL TEACHING

Aljaffery, Yacoub

Metaphors have been widely used in novels, short stories, and poems. However, they have also proved extremely useful as teaching tools, and can be particularly helpful when teaching language. Teaching a new language is one of the hardest teaching jobs because it requires multiple skills at once. For instance, a language teacher should be knowledgeable about his/her topic, and be both patient and creative. Every teacher has his/her own method of delivering information to students; these can be straightforward out-ofthe-book methods, or more creative methods. I believe strongly in teaching creatively. So, I find metaphor use to be one of the most effective and creative ways of teaching a language. Since I started teaching English, I have been using a variety of metaphors that I draw from the culture of the students I am teaching. This paper will help other English teachers to use the metaphors I have developed to make English learning easier. This study will illustrate to what extent the metaphors I use in my classes are effective at helping me to deliver my lesson and achieve my class objective. I also will investigate how much students enjoyed these lessons. My study is based on the following: 1. I use metaphors, which I will be explaining in this paper, to deliver lessons that seem to be hard for my students to understand. I make it clear to students that I am using metaphors. 2. After introducing every metaphor throughout the fall semester of 2013, I observe my students’ performance to see how well they understood the lesson. 3. After delivering all the metaphors in class, I distribute a survey for students to answer regarding how these metaphors improved the lesson and their understanding of it.

Conference or Workshop Item
PeerReviewed

2014

3555