The ability to recognise, discuss and evaluate one’s educational beliefs and working practices in metaphoric terms has for several years been seen as a highly valuable tool for increasing self-awareness, facilitating learning (or teaching), and/or predicting behaviour. This is the first edited book solely devoted to the topic of researching elicited metaphor in education, and brings together key researchers from China, Poland, Puerto Rico, South America, UK and USA. The 12 chapters involve overviews and state-of-the-art articles, articles focussing on methodology and validation, as well as reflections on the effectiveness of techniques and research reports of recent empirical studies. The bulk of the articles relate to literacy (L1 and L2) and teacher education, but science education is also addressed. The book offers useful models for academics, professionals and PhD students in these areas, and provides solutions for improving the validity of elicited metaphor techniques in educational research.

'Metaphor in Educational Discourse is a superb piece of applied linguistics research that integrates Vygotsky's theory of concepts with current work on metaphor into a coherent framework for investigating how teachers and learners negotiate figurative language in order to promote development in the classroom setting. In what is likely to become the standard for future studies in this area, Lynne Cameron meticulously demonstrates the central role of linguistic metaphors in classroom learning - designed to lead learners to a deeper understanding of complex mathematical and scientific concepts.' James P. Lantolf, Professor of Applied Linguistics, The Pennsylvania State University. This book reports research into metaphor in use with school students. The setting for the research is a UK school and the participants are around ten years old, with their first language well established but still developing concepts and understandings. Close examination of a corpus of classroom spoken discourse reveals how metaphor is employed by their teachers, not just in explaining ideas, but, in managing and mediating the activity of the classroom and the learning of the students. Particular issues discussed include: the problems of identifying metaphors in spoken discourse, the conventionalism of metaphors in the discourse of socio-cultural groups, and how a socio-cultural approach can account for systematicity in metaphor use.

This collection of papers presents some recent trends in metaphor studies that propose new directions of research on the embodied cognition perspective. The overall volume, in particular, shows how the embodied cognition still remains a relevant approach in a multidisciplinary research on the communicative side of metaphors, by focusing on both comprehension processes in science as well as learning processes in education.

This updated second edition unpacks the discussions surrounding the finest qualitative methods used in contemporary educational research. Bringing together scholars from around the world, this Handbook offers sophisticated insights into the theories and disciplinary approaches to qualitative study and the processes of data collection, analysis and representation, offering fresh ideas to inspire and re-invigorate researchers in educational research.

Today, the meaning of literacy, what it means to be literate, has shifted dramatically. Literacy involves more than a set of conventions to be learned, either through print or technological formats. Rather, literacy enables people to negotiate meaning. The past decade has witnessed increased attention on multiple literacies and modalities of learning associated with teacher preparation and practice. Research recognizes both the increasing cultural and linguistic diversity in the new globalized society and the new variety of text forms from multiple communicative technologies. There is also the need for new skills to operate successfully in the changing literate and increasingly diversified social environment. Linguists, anthropologists, educators, and social theorists no longer believe that literacy can be defined as a concrete list of skills that people merely manipulate and use. Rather, they argue that becoming literate is about what people do with literacy—the values people place on various acts and their associated ideologies. In other words, literacy is more than linguistic; it is political and social practice that limits or creates possibilities for who people become as literate beings. Such understandings of literacy have informed and continue to inform our work with teachers who take a sociological or critical perspective toward literacy instruction. Importantly, as research indicates, the disciplines pose specialized and unique literacy demands. Disciplinary literacy refers to the idea that we should teach the specialized ways of reading, understanding, and thinking used in each academic discipline, such as science, mathematics, engineering, history, or literature. Each field has its own ways of using text to create and communicate meaning. Accordingly, as children advance through school, literacy instruction should shift from general literacy strategies to the more specific or specialized ones from each discipline. Teacher preparation programs emphasizing different disciplinary literacies acknowledge that old approaches to literacy are no longer sufficient. Literacy in Teacher Preparation and Practice: Enabling Individuals to Negotiate Meaning introduces the reader to a collection of thoughtful, research-based works by authors that represent current thinking about literacy across disciplines and the preparation of teachers to enter classrooms. Each chapter focuses on teaching guided by literacies across disciplines and the preparation of teachers who will enter classrooms to instruct the next generation of students.