engleski

'Metaphor Literacy': Comprehension of Metaphors in History Textbooks by Primary School Students

The purpose of this paper is twofold: to investigate the use of metaphors in history textbooks for primary school from grades five to eight, and to test the understanding of texts abundant with metaphors vs metaphor-free texts by the population using the textbooks. The age of the students considered in this study is between 10 and 15. Since the cognitive development of children moves from a concrete operational stage to a formal operational stage (Piaget 1954), determined by a child’s biological maturation and interaction with the environment, it is expected that there will be differences among the tested children in terms of the ability to understand metaphorical language used in textbooks. Even if at a certain age children are able to comprehend metaphors, the question arises if students can understand abstract and unknown facts related to history when described using metaphorical language. We hypothesize that metaphor comprehension ability, or ‘metaphorical literacy’, is a very important factor in understanding the content of a lesson, which then enables independent learning. Identification of metaphors is done using MIPVU method (Steen et al. 2010), whereas comprehension tests are conducted using usual comprehension testing methods.

metaphor literacy, metaphor, history textbooks, comprehension

nije evidentirano