Children’s ability to interpret metaphorical polysemy in educational materials

Metaphor is used as a tool for communicating specialist knowledge to non-specialists in popular discourse and in educational contexts. Research has explored its use in higher education, but less is known about its efficacy with learners of school age. Experimental research has shown that very young children are able to interpret and produce attributional metaphors, but that relational metaphors and analogies do not seem to be understood until late childhood. The qualitative study reported here complements that work. We interviewed 30 children aged between 10 and 12 in focus groups, eliciting instances of academic words and meanings that they found new and challenging, and using naturally-occurring educational texts as prompts for discussion about individual words. We found some awareness of polysemy in general, and of word meanings that have a metaphorical basis. However, when they encountered a new metaphor-related meaning of a known word, the children showed a tendency to fall back on the previously known meaning even where this was contextually unfeasible. When specifically asked to work out the new meanings, it became evident that this is often challenging for them even with scaffolding.