Cameron Lynne. Metaphor in Educational Discourse

London: Continuum, 2003. — 294 p.Lynne Cameron's Metaphors in Educational Discourse is the third title in the Advances in Applied Linguistics series. Partly by coincidence
and partly by design, Cameron's book, which explores how children make sense of scientific phenomena and the role metaphor plays in
this sense-making, marks a continuation of the first title in the series, Multimodal Teaching and Learning: The Rhetorics of the Science
Classroom (Kress, Jewitt, Ogborn and Tsatsarelis, 2001). While Kress et al. emphasize the need for a multimodal approach in the educational
setting which takes us beyond language as such, Cameron's focus remains on language, but her analysis is far from being merely
linguistic, as she deals with the use of the figurative/metaphorical language in the teaching/learning context. In a sense, language
becomes conceptualized as a multimodal phenomenon, embodying different layers of interpretive practices.
Another point of departure for the present book can be located in how the research came about. Unlike the Kress et al. volume, which
arose from a funded team-based, interdisciplinary project, Cameron's book is an example of long-standing doctoral and post-doctoral
research at an individual level. One of the founding goals of this series was to disseminate different kinds of research in the field of
applied linguistics. As we see it, Cameron's book serves as an excellent example of doctoral research which offers considerable scope for
emulative studies by herself and by others, in different disciplinary fields, and in different educational settings across different cultures.
Although the data are drawn from a single site, the richness of the dana and the sophisticated nature of the data analysis make up for any lack
of breadth in the corpus; it persuades the reader of the generalizability of the findings.