This book remaps theories and practices for teaching creative writing at university and college level. This collection critiques well-established approaches for teaching creative writing in all genres and builds a comprehensive and adaptable pedagogy based on issues of authority, power, and identity. A long-needed reflection, this book shapes…

A survey of educators and speech-language pathologists (n=806) was conducted to determine current perceptions and practices regarding figurative language instruction. Results showed that the majority of respondents provided either formal or informal figurative language instruction and believe that students in special education had more problems…

In many ways, the changing history of the Dutch windmills reminds the author of the many teacher education programs she has worked with and, in particular, the one she now works with at the University of Washington. To those who are unfamiliar with the inner workings of teacher education, programs that prepare teachers probably appear much as they…

This paper introduces a method for computer-based analyses of metaphor in discourse, combining quantitative and qualitative elements. This method is illustrated with data from research on German newspaper discourse concerning the ongoing system transformations of the late 1980s and early 1990s. Methodological aspects of the research procedure are…

New information and communications technologies have transformed the archival enterprise in less than a quarter century. They have changed the way we work and, more importantly, our relationship with the wider society. Access to archives has increased immeasurably and spurred demand for use of archives. At the same time, in a painful irony, public…

The study "New Media in the Humanities: from metaphors of inevitability to metaphors of possibility," argues that using digital technologies in humanities classrooms (at the post-secondary level) is transformative for both students and professors. It begins by identifying and then allaying the fears that scholars in the humanities…

The aim of the present study was to investigate idiom comprehension in school-age Italian children with different reading comprehension skills. According to our hypothesis, the level of a child's text comprehension skills should predict his/her ability to understand idiomatic meanings. Idiom comprehension in fact requires children to go beyond a…

Professional development for teachers is often described as a journey. This paper, using the findings from a small-scale study interrogating professional development in ICT, offers the alternate metaphor of an interwoven Celtic knot to explain this phenomenon. It will show how the four key elements identified as being critical to creating the most…

Intended for teachers of grades 4-8, this book provides tools and resources to help students fall in love with literature. The book contains reproducible glossaries containing over 200 literary, genre, book content, and book construction terms, along with removable flashcards, to make reviewing language arts essentials easy, enjoyable, and fun.…

Synectics is the use of thinking in metaphors, or figurative language in general, to see the familiar in unfamiliar ways or the unfamiliar in familiar ways. W.J.J. Gordon and his Cambridge Synectics Group isolated ways to think metaphorically by using artistic problem-solving mechanisms most people possess in their experiential background. This…

Lexical derivation in the Navajo verb system is described, with examples. Derivation involves four broad processes: (1) straightforward use of verbal roots and adverbial-derivational prefixes, with their base meanings; (2) extension of base root meaning, often by metaphor, to permit application to disparate concepts; (3) figurative use of…

Three universes of discourse are at work when writers create or use a metaphor: the analogical or metaphorical universe from which they borrow words, things, and relationships (sometimes called the "vehicle"); the contextual universe in which the analogy is being used (sometimes called the "topic"); and the metauniverse, or the comprehensive…

Designed with junior high school students in mind, the activities in this booklet are offered as ways to stimulate interest in writing using as little as ten minutes of class time. The activities are arranged in six sections: (1) developing observation skills and paying attention to details; (2) word play, descriptive words, and word collections…

The experiments described in this paper compare inference-based and expectancy-based models of the comprehension of indirect, non-literal expressions. The inference-based model claims that the comprehension of non-literal meanings requires more and deeper processing than the comprehension of literal meanings. The expectancy-based model rests on…

There are a number of reasons for using creative writing in elementary and secondary English curricula. When students practice using figurative and literal language, they improve their speaking abilities, and their language becomes more concrete, more explicit, more descriptive, and more interesting. Writing poems and short stories forces students…