translating science for young people: metaphor and climate...

Translating science for young people:Metaphor and climate change

Alice Deignan (University of Leeds) and Elena Semino (Lancaster University)

School of EducationFACULTY OF ESSL

AHRC: AH/M003809/1

• Context• The project: ‘Translating science for young people’

– The corpora– Metaphors– Narratives

• Conclusions


Structure of talk

• On May 10th, 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.


Context: climate change, and young people

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.



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.

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


• 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.


Procedure for metaphor analysis


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

Most frequent lexical metaphors in the corpus of academic papers



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

Most frequent lexical metaphors in the corpus of teaching materials



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

Most frequent lexical metaphors in the corpus of student interviews

A SHARED METAPHOR: ‘GREENHOUSE’


‘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;

• 22nd most frequent metaphor in Academic Corpus:

0.2 instances per 1,000 words


‘greenhouse’ in academic articles


• 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.


Collocates of ‘greenhouse’ in academic articles


‘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?


‘greenhouse’ in textbooks

Collocates of ‘greenhouse’ in textbooks


‘Greenhouse’ in the student interviews


‘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.


Collocates of ‘greenhouse’ in the student interviews


Collocates at a glance


StudentsTextbooksAcademic

‘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.



‘glass’ in the Student corpus

‘glass’ in the Academic corpus

A LAY METAPHOR: ‘BAND’


‘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


BandStudent 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…. […]


BandStudent 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.


Band

Student 4: It’s like erm, erm, with all the pollution that’s going up into the air, that ermlike, 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


KEY SEMANTIC DOMAINS AND APOCALYPTIC NARRATIVES


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, etc.

+ 262.52 1.57

Dead + 240.68 2.54

Damaging and destroying + 53.52 1.03

‘Damaging and

destroying’:

top 25 items


Item Occurrences Item Occurrences

damage 20 break_down 3

harmful 18 damages 3

destroying 17 collapses 3

destroyed 16 destruction 2

destroys 13 harmed 2

damaging 12 broken_down 2

destroy 12 erosion 2

harm 9 breaking 2

erode 6 harming 2

eroding 5 erodes 2

ruining 5 collapse 2

ruined 4 blow_up 2

ruin 4


Narratives

S4 Yeah it’s like, so when all the ice melts, or as it’s melting now, it’s contributing to the rising water levels, so if that goes on, we’re gonnahave much more water and no land to stay on so we’re gonna have to be a bit more sea-wise.

S1 Yeah, well we’d have more water but less fish.

S4 Yeah, less animals to eat, and the food-chain would break down, and we’d have nothing to eat then we’ll all die.

S1 Well basically the earth would be completely and utterly uninhabitable so we’d have to look for somewhere else.

S4 Like the moon.

S1 Not the moon no, that’s also uninhabitable. The eco-system is just of

rock.

School of Education

FACULTY OF ESSL

Further in the same interview

S2 I don’t think I’ve learnt much about how it affects plants to be honest, just

habitation of animals.

S3 It sort of dries them up and makes them crisp I think. I’ve never really

learned about it.

S2 More amphibious creatures would be affected cos they’ve got to live in

land and in water, so if this, when the global err warming erm heats the

earth up, erm this err water where they live is gonna like be evaporated

quite quickly so then they need to keep their skin moist for them to

actually survive so they won’t actually have any water to actually help

them survive.

S1 And even if they didn’t evaporate, they’d just be cooked alive. I mean,

some fish are getting cooked alive in the oceans because the oceans are

heating up, and so, for the fish it’s basically like being in an oven. They’re

cooked alive and they just have to well, deal with it.

Popular narratives of climate change:

The Day after Tomorrow (2004)


Popular narratives of climate change:

Interstellar (2014)


Conclusions• The students we interviewed employ some ’expert’

metaphors and also develop their own metaphors.

• There is evidence of creative, collaborative engagement with these metaphors.

• This can aid understanding but also lead to scientifically inaccurate conclusions.

• School work involves learning about and producing a variety of genres, with focus on extending away from narratives, which are often believed to be familiar and basic.

• Students’ narratives in our data tend to be relatively simple co-constructed disaster narratives, reminiscent of apocalyptic fiction.


Possible implications


• Among other things, the combination of imprecise understandings through metaphor and disaster narratives may lead students to:– Misinterpret or underestimate warnings involving small

temperature changes and less dramatic effects; or– Conclude that nothing can be done to avert future

catastrophes.

• Both conclusions may lead to inaction.• A greater awareness of different uses of metaphors

and narratives is needed in science teaching.

Thank you


translating science for young people: metaphor and climate...

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