Communicating academic content to international students: Interplay and variations in the use of verbal and gestural metaphor

It is important for university lecturers to be aware of the needs of international students studying at their universities and of the potential difficulties that they may face. One area of difficulty that these students experience relates to the use of metaphor by academics in lectures and seminars. As well as presenting problems, metaphors also have the potential to facilitate understanding and improve communication. By observing lecturers who have experience in conversation with international students we may learn useful lessons about how best to communicate with them using metaphor. In this study, we investigate how a lecturer from a Department of International Development made use of metaphor when presenting her work to two international students: one from her department and one from outside her department. The findings show that the verbal and the gestural metaphor appeared to serve a range of functions with the two different interlocutors.