Designed to assess the ability to interpret the major types of figurative language or tropes such as similes, metaphors, proverbs, and personification, the two forms of this instrument each contain 50 items in a two-part, multiple-choice format. Part I tests the meaning of figures of speech in isolation; part II tests the meaning in the context of…

When asked to teach a newly-created course entitled "Women and Creativity," a woman who loved teaching was eager for the opportunity to share stories about women with a class made up primarily of women. The course proposal, course objectives, and suggested texts initially seemed so outlined in scholarly language that the concept of…

Structure mapping theory is a way of characterizing analogies and certain classes of metaphors. The central claim of this paper is that all analogies and many metaphors are fundamentally devices for mapping relational structures from one domain to another. This theory differs from other theories in postulating that the interpretation rules for…

A study examined basal readers and trade books in terms of reading ease as estimated by readability formulas and the incidence of figurative language. Based on an earlier study, the study had three major goals: to (1) assess and compare two reading series ("A" and "B") at each of two grade levels; (2) assess and compare…

The use of metaphors to frame problems and gain insight into educational phenomena has received little attention in the literature. This study shows that principals' use of metaphoric language to discuss their work environment and instructional leadership roles is a valid means of understanding school administrator behavior. The study focused on…

A study examined the lyrics of the lovesongs of the musical partnership Eurythmics (David Stewart and Annie Lennox), a popular music group. The method used was based on the James Chesbro study, which classified lyrics using a critical paradigm that combined Northrop Frye's hierarchy of communications systems (Ironic, Mimetic, Leader-centered,…

While researchers have made progress in understanding metaphor comprehension, less is known about the production of metaphoric language. College students (N=129) were asked to use metaphoric comparisons to describe 16 topics. They were told to imagine themselves on a trip, writing home to someone they knew well, either a peer or a child (students…

This paper discusses the metaphor "organizations as organisms" as conceived of by Garith Morgan (1997, 1998) in the books "Images of Organization" and "Images of Organization: The Executive Edition." It applies the metaphor to adult and in particular distance education management and organizations in an attempt to…

An historical review of definitions of visual literacy is summarized by the statement, "the transmission of meaning visually is what visual literacy is all about." To be visually literate is to be able to gain meaning from what we see and to be able to communicate meaning to others through the images we create. Three assumptions, taken from the…

Hitherto, theories of similarity have restricted themselves to judgments of what might be called literal similarity. A central thesis of this paper is that a complete account of similarity needs also to be sensitive to nonliteralness, or metaphoricity, an aspect of similarity statements that is most evident in similes, but that actually underlies…

A total of 411 elementary school children seven to twelve years old read short prose passages and selected the most appropriate continuation sentence from four alternatives. The completion sentences were constructed so that the correct (target) response involved either an explicit (simile) or an implicit (metaphor) metaphorical comparison. It was…

THESE THREE TESTS--"ROUGHING IT,""THE OLD MAN AND THE SEA," AND "THE SHORT STORY"--WERE DESIGNED BY THE OREGON CURRICULUM STUDY CENTER FOR A NINTH-GRADE LITERATURE CURRICULUM. THEY ARE INTENDED TO ACCOMPANY CURRICULUM UNITS AVAILABLE AS ED 010 811 AND ED 010 812. (MM)

Defining metaphor as "seeing a concept from one class in terms of a concept from another class," a study was devised that analyzed the degree to which two concepts occupy dissimilar positions with respect to their category or domain (within-domain distance), and the degree to which categories themselves are dissimilar (between-domain distance).…