Grammatical metaphor: WHAT, WHY and HOW

Lexical metaphor is a familiar aspect of persuasive writing instruction in Australian schools. Another form of metaphor known as grammatical metaphor is widely used in the research literature. However, this term is less known in sc hool contexts, although it implicitly relates to a number of content descriptors from Year 1 to Year 10 in the Australian Curriculum: English, and strongly influences the marking criteria of the NAPLAN rubric. In this presentation, I will explain what grammatical metaphor is, why it is important to student persuasive writing, and how it relates to the Australian Curriculum: English and the NAPLAN marking guide. The presentation will be supported by an analysis of the content descriptors of the Language Strand, of the NAPLAN marking guide, and of student persuasive texts that scored highly on the 2011 NAPLAN writing test. This presentation is drawn on a two-year project (2017- 2019) investigating different types of grammatical metaphors in persuasive texts written by high achieving students in the NAPLAN test in Tasmania in 2011. The findings have been published in research articles (To & Thomas, 2017; To et al., 2020). This research is valuable to primary and secondary school teachers who seek to understand explicit language choices in persuasive writing to prepare their students for effective writing of this text type in the standardized and authentic contexts.