Pilar Valero at Humboldt University

It was a pleasure to have the opportunity to be yesterday at Humboldt University (Berlin, Germany). Specifically, I was happy to participate in a seminar focused on the study of metaphor (Thank you Prof. Dr. Egg for this special invitation!). In particular, I talked about the role of metaphor in foreign language teaching, since my work at different universities (University of Tübingen, Universidad Nebrija or Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha), focuses precisely on teaching Spanish as a foreign language. In fact, my experience as a teacher of Spanish as a second language has taught me that metaphorical competence is an important component of learners’ communicative competence, but, unfortunately, the resources we (at least teachers of Spanish as a second language) can find to integrate metaphors into the classroom are scarce. Authors, like Boers, Lindstromberg or Kalyuga, for instance, in the field of L2 metaphor acquisition, have also claimed the need for metaphors to be explicitly taught in language courses because the explicit treatment of metaphor improves both the comprehension and the production of the metaphorical expressions at any level.

Thank you to all students for coming!