Using Critical Metaphor Analysis to Extract Parents' Cultural Models of How Their Children Learn to Read

This research presents an empirical study on metaphor based on numerous interviews with parents of young children. Contemporary metaphor theory is complemented by a well-articulated place for culture and the role metaphor plays in cultural understanding. I demonstrate that 1) parents understand learning to read as the acquisition of reading skills; 2) different parents repeatedly use the same metaphors when describing these reading skills; 3) because parents have a folk or common-sense understanding of learning to read, the metaphors help organize their reasoning; 4) the metaphors also index sociocultural information at the level of the communicative event, specifically aspects of morality; 5) the hegemonic structure of this morality is evoked through indirect indexicality and is therefore registered and reproduced below the speaker's threshold of awareness.