Metaphor and education: Reaching business training goals through multimodal metaphor

Abstract

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.