Abstract Summary
The presentation focuses on instances of metaphoricity generated during oral foreign language examinations. Main question is whether the negotiation of metaphor can fall under the scope of symbolic power (Kramsch 2011) and thus contribute to discursive inequalities that can reflect on other discourses of social life outside the examination room.
Abstract :
Oral foreign language examinations (OFLEs) can be considered as an extended form of institutional conversation, where the complex relationship among task writer's choices, examiner input, examinee output, cultural and discursive conventions, and generated social micro- and macro-dynamics shapes the context and outcome of this kind of intercultural interactions. The presentation focuses on the role of metaphors and their linguistic, cognitive, embodied, and aesthetic negotiation in the intercultural environment of OFLEs at C-level of competence (CEFR).
In order to examine this further, we draw upon transcribed and analyzed data from nationwide OFLEs for the German Language. To bring out the intercultural variable we formed an experimental and a control group of examiner-examinee pairs, where examiners were of German and Greek L1/C1 respectively and examinees of Greek L1/C1.
The data were analyzed based on Conversation Analysis (CA) principles, whereas emergent metaphoricities (Kramsch 2011) in terms of their discursive and cross-cultural value through the use of Conceptual Metaphor Analysis (Boers 2003,Kovecses 2005,Lakoff 2006,Fauconnier & Turner 2008).
The main questions to be discussed in the presentation are: (i) how does the teaching of figurative competence create instances of symbolic inequalities (Hua & Kramsch 2016) within an OFLE environment, (ii) at which levels are metaphors negotiated (cognitive, narrative, affective, etc.) during an OFLE and if they correspond to the levels symbolic inequalities are experienced, (iii) who are the agents that co-construct metaphoricities and what role does the task writer play as projected Other, (iv) do metaphors hinder the process of utterance legitimization between examiners/examinees and what does this imply for the native/non-native speaker discussion, (v) do generated symbolic inequalities go beyond the scope of an OFLE and are they reproduced in other discourses of social life, and (vi) if there can be a framework for implementing metaphorical elements in OFLEs without injuring the assessment's validity.
