Tina Beynen, a Carleton linguistics master’s student, is studying how English idioms and metaphors in books can be the bane of learners whose first language is not English.
Beynen said her research is aimed at answering the question of how post-secondary English as a second language (ESL) learners comprehend English metaphors and the Western cultural references the metaphors are based on.
Beynen said she is attempting to fill in the dark areas of data relating to post-secondary students.
Though there is other research related to metaphor comprehension of ESL students, Beynen has encountered “almost nothing in the post-secondary context.”
She said she is focusing on a wider, more overarching concept of “structural metaphors.”
These metaphors help people understand and express a concept in terms of another, and are influenced by culture, she said.
Beynen said examples such as “love is blind” or “that cake is calling my name” are typically Western structures.
Western idioms and metaphors use the concept of time as linear and as a commodity, she said. This makes it difficult to understand for someone from a different cultural background that doesn’t conceptualize time this way.
“We think of time in terms of past, present, future . . . but also we can spend time or make time,” Beynen said.
She said it’s important to study the possibility that ESL students are misunderstanding metaphors, as more and more international students are attending predominantly English-speaking schools.
“These students pay much higher tuition rates, and so I feel as though we owe it to them to help them succeed,” she said.
Beynen is hoping her research will ease learning for some students.
“Learning English as a second language has enough challenges . . . as does pursuing post-secondary study in a second language,” she said.
