Metaphor and education: Reaching business training goals through multimodal metaphor

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. (C) 2013 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.