Monitoring and evaluating body knowledge: metaphors and metonymies of body position in children’s music instrument instruction

Abstract

Abstract This paper examines music instrument teachers’ instructive use of noun metaphors and metonymies of behaviors related to the playing and handling of a musical instrument. Drawing on 10 video-recorded 30–40 min-long instrument lessons as data, and conversation analysis as a method, the paper examines the temporal location of these figurative turns (i.e., instruction turns including a noun metaphor or metonymy) within the instructional activities and in relation to the student’s behaviors. At the beginning of a new instructional sequence, a figurative turn allows the teacher to test and monitor the level of student’s knowledge, while the student orients to a need to demonstrate that knowledge. Figurative turns also enable the teacher to initiate correction in complex movement sequences, its organization as a series of metaphors or metonymies enabling an easy return to an earlier point in a sequence. Furthermore, the flexibility of metaphors and metonymies as interactional resources is evidenced by the ease by which a figurative instruction turn may be transformed into an affirmative evaluation of student conduct. The paper thus suggests that instructing body knowledge through metaphors and metonymies has significant pedagogical advantages, also providing a detailed account for why and how this is the case.