Developing language awareness through students' conceptualisations : metaphoric approach in content courses

Abstract

This article aims to demonstrate to university lecturers as well as to students how “thinking outside the box” by means of metaphoric conceptualisations of studied issues in content courses can raise awareness about these issues. Two pedagogical dimensions are especially in focus here. First of all, one is the promotion of a more active involvement of students in content courses and a better understanding of content issues through a more creative approach to them. The second dimension of this creative approach can impact syllabus construction and the methodology used by lecturers. This article makes use of real life activities employed during lectures on multilingualism, focusing on complex issues of understanding multilingualism and individual multilinguality and the concept of the multilingual mental lexicon (MML). The teaching strategy used here consisted of introducing multilingualism and MML by means of individual student conceptualisations presented in a form of metaphoric representations (in this case, similes).