Metaphors and gestures in music teaching: an examination of junior high schools in Taiwan

In cognitive metaphor theory, metaphor is a conceptual and experiential process that structures our world. This study, taking an applied linguistic' view on CMT, examines how metaphor is manifested in speech and via gestures by music teachers in classrooms where Mandarin Chinese is the main language employed. Thirteen music sessions by, and interviews with, six teachers in six junior high schools in Taiwan constitute the data. The three-stage analysis focuses on the nature of verbal and gestural metaphors, the relations between verbal and gestural metaphors, their functions, and the educational implications. The study represents an original and exploratory empirical contribution to the field, and the results further support CMT by providing empirical data on how native speakers of Chinese express metaphor via the two modalities. It also contributes to metaphor identification procedures for identifying metaphorically-used words in Chinese, and coding metaphoric gestures.

Chapter 1 concerns the motivation for the study, its aims and significance, and the initial research questions. Chapter 2 provides a background context for the study by reviewing the existing research in the field of verbal and gestural metaphor use in (music) classrooms, and by giving an introduction to the current education system in Taiwan. After this, chapters 3 and 4 describe a preliminary and a pilot study designed to explore the ground and examine the feasibility of the intended research design. These are followed by the research design and methodology for the main study in chapter 5. Chapter 6 covers the methods of transcribing, identifying verbal metaphors, and coding metaphoric gestures, used in the main study. The results and discussion of the data analysis of the main study are dealt with in chapter 7. Finally, conclusions, implications, limitations, and suggestions are presented in chapter 8.