Effects of metaphor on science text comprehension

• Main Authors: Chen Kang-pei, 陳綱佩
• Other Authors: Po-Fang Chang
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Published: 2001
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/06422490184452938510

碩士 === 國立交通大學 === 傳播所 === 89 === The purpose of this research is to examine whether relevant use of metaphor in science texts will contribute to a reading comprehension enhancement of readers. Generally speaking, one of the major purposes of technical writings is to use precise words and expressions to convey accurate science concepts that allow readers of those texts to obtain correct science information. Based on this major purpose, literal rhetoric usages like metaphor are not recommended to adopt as parts of technical writings. Metaphor is traditionally regarded as the most important literal rhetoric skill that usually associates words and phrases to metaphorical meanings that are beyond or different from the literal ones. However, metaphor is often seen in science discourse and technical writings. To pursuit our research purpose, thirty-three students from Ta Ming high school in Taichung County participated in the within-subject experiment of this research. During the experiment, all students have to read four science reports that are adapted from different science magazines. Each of the four science reports has two versions─the “with-metaphor” and the “without-metaphor” version. The “with-metaphor” version is identical with the “without-metaphor” version except that there was an additional metaphor sentence in the with-metaphor version at the first paragraph. Among the four science reports, two were reports with-metaphor, and two were reports without-metaphor. Which two science reports were with metaphors were chosen randomly for each student. After reading each science report, the students were asked to write down every single detail they still remembered about the reports they had just read. The procedure repeated until four science reports were completed. At the end of the experiment, the students were asked to take a reading comprehension test constructed by the experimenter with sixteen signal option questions in it. Although reading comprehension test fail to show any effect of metaphor on reading comprehension, the macroproposition we obtained from students’ recall protocols showed that science articles that contained metaphor in the text indeed enhanced students’ text comprehension. Specifically, there were significant main effects of metaphor on the recall of correct macropropostion and situation model. Furthermore, the main effect of metaphor was also significant on the incorrect macropropositions. Based on those results, we concluded that inclusion of a relevant metaphor may enhance reading comprehension of science texts.