ABSTRACT

This chapter focuses on the development of figurative language comprehension among learners of Russian as a foreign language (RFL). The first part of the chapter focuses on existing traditions of teaching figurative language and provides a review of the approaches adopted by educators for familiarizing learners of RFL with indirect meanings of words and expressions. It also reviews the use of figurative phrases in the RFL curricula. The second part describes a learning situation that raises metaphor awareness. The learning experience has been designed to involve students in the conscious processing of a metaphor that utilizes the name of one city for portraying another. Five steps in processing the metaphor are activated through a task-based language learning situation: metaphor noticing, retrieval of source domain properties, associative fluency, analogical reasoning, and image formation. The learning situation involves the use of vocabulary for tourists and promotes cultural literacy. The chapter concludes with an analysis of this teaching experience and offers additional ideas on extending the use of figurative clusters offered by the core curriculum.