Metaphor and education: Reaching business training goals through multimodal metaphor

Metaphor facilitates education by allowing for new perspectives or in aiding categorization and memorization. This study looks into the use of metaphor in a business training talk. The results show that the speaker repeatedly used words and gestures to express the journey metaphor. The project was also conceptualized as a physical object and managing a project as conducting an orchestra, both verbally and in the co-speech gesture. Other verbal war and sports metaphors were supported by either co-speech gestures or metaphoric images. Metaphors in business training settings seem to actively assist in persuading the business practitioners of the need to acquire a particular management ability.

As an Open Access publication the Procedia Social and Behavioral Sciences is published under Creative Commons license – Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0)