La metáfora como recurso didáctico en el aula de ELE: un estudio a partir de la lingüística cognitiva

The formulation of the Cognitive Theory of the Metaphor by Lakoff and Johnson (1980) represented a turning point in the meaning of this literary device, which was no longer considered a simple literary embellishment to become instead an essential procedure of the conceptualization of the reality, imbuing language and articulating the thinking process. Following this pioneering analysis, many scholars, mostly from the field of English as a Foreign Language (EFL), soon recognised in the metaphor a didactic potential for the development of communicative competence among L2 students. However, research on metaphors remains negligible, when compared with that in other areas of foreign language acquisition. Within the ELE (Spanish as a Foreign Language) context, the situation is even more precarious. In this paper, I build upon the information provided by two questionnaires to analyse the opinions and assessments held by teachers and students of ELE regarding the use of the metaphor. The first questionnaire was distributed among 87 teachers, most of them with a solid training in ELE and over two years of experience in several educative institutions (universities, Instituto Cervantes, language schools) in 19 different countries. 84 students of 16 different nationalities answered the second questionnaire. They learn Spanish mostly at university, Instituto Cervantes or EOI, with a Spanish level ranging between A2 and C2. Overall, three main findings should be highlighted. First, the results show a clear interest in the possibilities of the metaphor as a didactic tool. Second, they indicate that metaphors are basically employed when teaching vocabulary by using collections of idiomatic expressions, being mainly taught through literary texts and songs. Finally, the need of more teaching materials becomes also evident. From the results of the survey and the literature review, I have then created a didactic proposal that aims at fulfilling the objective of being useful for the improvement of the communicative competence of ELE learners and whose efficacy should be demonstrated in forthcoming research.