Metaphor not as a stylistic but as a cognitive device: English language information technology manuals as a test case

Résumé Fr En

Agissant en tant que personne ressource dans un atelier dont l’objectif était d’essayer d’évaluer dans quelle mesure la connaissance de l’anglais jouait un rôle plus ou moins important dans le fait que l’on soit capable d’apprendre à utiliser un logiciel de manière autonome, j’ai observé que les obstacles à l’auto-apprentissage n’étaient pas linguistiques mais plutôt le fait que les apprenants n’avaient pas ou avaient une image fausse de la manière dont fonctionne un traitement de texte.

Acting as a resource person for English in a workshop whose objective was to try and assess to what extent the knowledge of English played a more or less important part in learners being able to learn to use software autonomously, I observed that the obstacles to self-training were not linguistic ones but rather the fact that the learners had no image or the wrong image of how a word processor works. But what is actually meant by ‘mental model’ of an I.T. system or computer-supported task? How does it function in the mental process of a user? And how is it formed? To what extent do explicit verbal metaphors clarify computer and information system concepts? What are the characteristics of effective verbal metaphors for information technology concepts? Are the implicit metaphors contained in the names given to some computer and information system concepts useful, useless or misleading? Do they work in the same way for English-speaking learners and for learners to whom English is a foreign language? These are the issues I propose to approach in my paper.