School of Education FACULTY OF ESSL Translating science for young people: Metaphor and climate change Alice Deignan (University of Leeds) and Elena Semino (Lancaster University) AHRC: AH/M003809/1
School of Education FACULTY OF ESSL Structure of talk • Context • The project: ‘Translating science for young people’ – The corpora – Metaphors – Narratives • Conclusions
School of Education FACULTY OF ESSL Context: climate change, and young people • On May 10 th , 2013, carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere went over 400 parts per million, a level not seen for 3 million years. • 2016 was the warmest year on record (NASA). • 17 of the 18 warmest years on record are since 2001 (NASA). • While barely perceptible from an individual’s perspective, climate change could have a major and negative impact on the lives of future generations, perhaps within this century. • Young people are under pressure to conspicuously consume, through peer pressure & social media.
School of Education FACULTY OF ESSL Research vs media • Scientists have reached an almost unanimous consensus that climate change is real, anthropogenic and potentially severe. • The media tend to present a divergence of views that is potentially misleading, because of the perceived need to give ‘balanced’ coverage.
School of Education FACULTY OF ESSL Changes to the National Curriculum for England and Wales 2014 • Primary school: no mention of climate change. • Secondary school: • Minimal coverage in Chemistry (compulsory) • More extended coverage in Geography (optional)
Metaphors and narratives • Metaphor: Talking, and potentially thinking, about one thing in terms of another, where the two ‘things’ are different, but some form of similarity can be perceived between them. • Narrative: The telling of a series of two or more interconnected events, normally involving one or more agents/participants. • Both are central to communication and sense-making, including in science and education. • Both have ‘framing’ effects.
School of Education FACULTY OF ESSL Corpora • Corpus 1: academic articles on climate change from ‘Climate Change’, ‘Global Environmental Change’ and ‘Nature’ (2000 - 2010): 250,733 words • Corpus 2: teaching and educational materials on climate change (2005-2015): 206,976 words • Corpus 3: 41 group interviews with UK secondary school students on the topic of climate change: 87,888 words
School of Education FACULTY OF ESSL Procedure for metaphor analysis • Used corpus linguistic software to produce word frequency lists for each corpus; • Disregarded grammatical words; • Analysed lexical words in order of frequency, using concordance data, to identify metaphorical and other figurative uses; • Analysed the meaning and linguistic features of metaphorical uses.
School of Education FACULTY OF ESSL Most frequent lexical metaphors in the corpus of academic papers rank Word/ lemma rank Word/ lemma 1 model =13 shift 2 impact =13 forcing 3 scenario 15 lead 4 high =16 growth 5 response =16 find 6 value 18 peak 7 low 19 strong 8 base 20 adopt 9 level 21 adaptation =10 see 22 greenhouse =10 approach 23 sensitivity 12 adoption 24 market
School of Education FACULTY OF ESSL Most frequent lexical metaphors in the corpus of teaching materials rank Word/ lemma rank Word/ lemma 1 greenhouse 13 cut 2 rise 14 growth 3 level 15 pattern 4 impact 16 find 5 go 17 threat 6 see 18 grow 7 way 19 clear 8 large 20 target 9 high 21 key 10 release 22 strong 11 model 23 come 12 lead 24 sheet
School of Education FACULTY OF ESSL Most frequent lexical metaphors in the corpus of student interviews rank Word/ lemma rank Word/ lemma 1 go 13 rise 2 greenhouse 14 level 3 way =15 escape 4 cap =15 impact 5 release =15 link 6 trap 18 contribute 7 lead 19 balance 8 slow 20 save 9 point =21 low 10 bounce =21 footprint 11 chain 23 band 12 blanket 24 play
School of Education FACULTY OF ESSL A SHARED METAPHOR: ‘GREENHOUSE’
School of Education FACULTY OF ESSL ‘greenhouse’ in our data • Top most frequent metaphor in Materials corpus: 2.5 instances per 1,000 words; • Second most frequent metaphor in Interviews corpus: 2.1 instances per 1,000 words; • 22 nd most frequent metaphor in Academic Corpus: 0.2 instances per 1,000 words
School of Education FACULTY OF ESSL ‘greenhouse’ in academic articles
School of Education FACULTY OF ESSL • In every case, greenhouse appears before another noun, sometimes one of several in a long noun group, e.g. greenhouse gas concentrations , greenhouse gas mitigation strategy • In these citations, it has a purely technical meaning: no evidence of active link to the original literal meaning of the metaphor.
School of Education FACULTY OF ESSL C ollocates of ‘greenhouse’ in academic articles
School of Education FACULTY OF ESSL ‘greenhouse’ in textbooks
School of Education FACULTY OF ESSL ‘greenhouse’ in textbooks • Used before another noun (especially ‘gas( es )’, but also: Simile Certain gases in the atmosphere act like glass in a greenhouse , Now carbon dioxide and methane are building up in the atmosphere. They are acting like a greenhouse around the Earth. Literal An ordinary greenhouse keeps plants warm in winter without using a heater. What happens when you go into a greenhouse on a sunny day? It's hot, isn't it?
School of Education FACULTY OF ESSL C ollocates of ‘greenhouse’ in textbooks
School of Education FACULTY OF ESSL ‘Greenhouse’ in the student interviews
School of Education FACULTY OF ESSL ‘greenhouse’ in the student interviews • There’s a massive greenhouse and the world’s inside and it just keeps getting hotter. • Put a greenhouse around the world, all the gases, so then the heat can’t escape so it just keeps getting hotter and hotter. • Like when you go into a greenhouse it’s like really warm and stuff. And like imagine that but it’s like all around us and you can ’ t like escape.
School of Education FACULTY OF ESSL C ollocates of ‘greenhouse’ in the student interviews
School of Education FACULTY OF ESSL Collocates at a glance Textbooks Academic Students
School of Education FACULTY OF ESSL ‘greenhouse’ - Year 8 student my mum has a greenhouse so I kind of like refer back to that. It’s where like, because at certain heights the sun is able to get into like the glass.. it’s like, the earth is covered in like lots of glass panels but we just can’t see them, because the sun’s projecting into them. It doesn’t, it won’t come out, it’ll just keep coming in and when it tries to get out, it’ll just bounce off the roof and down in a continuous loop.
School of Education FACULTY OF ESSL ‘glass’ in the Academic corpus ‘glass’ in the Student corpus
School of Education FACULTY OF ESSL A LAY METAPHOR: ‘BAND’
School of Education FACULTY OF ESSL ‘band’ • 8 instances in the Interviews corpus, but all in one interview (Year 7 group, age 11-12); • No instances in the other two corpora
School of Education FACULTY OF ESSL Band Student 3: there’s like a band around the world and it like lets some of the CO2 out, and then it like goes, some of it goes out but some if it stays in cos the more CO2 that we’re using, erm , it’s like the band gets tighter and tighter …. Student 1: It’s to do with the erm, band , like the, a bit like a bubble round us, erm , that’s like getting thicker kind of thing, and it’s not letting as much out, as much CO2 out…. […]
School of Education FACULTY OF ESSL Band Student 3: Like there’s like a rubber band around the earth and then we’re in the middle of it. And then there’s this like thing called CO2 and it comes out of cars and stuff. It’s like pollution from factories and stuff like the smoke that you see and stuff that’s CO2. And then, it like goes up, yeah. Student 4: It goes up into the air and bounces off the rubber band and warms up the world and there’ll be different effects from that. Student 3: Yeah and we’re using more CO2, so the band gets tighter and tighter like, when you put a rubber band around your finger or something, it gets tighter and tighter. It’s like that around the earth, and then eventually the CO2 can’t get out and it like bounces off it and goes into the earth and warms the earth up.
School of Education FACULTY OF ESSL Band Student 4: It’s like erm, erm, with all the pollution that’s going up into the air, that erm like, erm, the like band around the earth, like erm getting tighter so it’s not letting things in, so it’s like the world like trapped in a giant greenhouse and it’s just getting hotter and hotter
School of Education FACULTY OF ESSL KEY SEMANTIC DOMAINS AND APOCALYPTIC NARRATIVES
School of Education FACULTY OF ESSL Keyness analysis • We used the semantic annotation tool in Wmatrix to compare the student interviews with the academic articles. • Overused semantic domains in the student interviews include: Semantic domain Log Likelihood Log ratio Temperature: Hot/on fire + 1344.21 2.40 Living creatures: animals, birds, + 262.52 1.57 etc. Dead + 240.68 2.54 Damaging and destroying + 53.52 1.03
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