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ackward-pointing gestures that are consistent with the front/past-back/futuremetaphors in their speech (Littlemore and Ngan, in press; Yau, 1997), which mayreflect the way s/he is thinking about time. The metaphoric gesture appears togive conflicting information about what is being said and this may make Chinesespeakers of English more difficult to understand because of their ‘gestural accent’.It is not surprising, then, to find that learners of a foreign language may find itdifficult to understand and produce the metaphors conventionally used in anotherlanguage, because they often do not match those they use in their mother tongue.As well as metaphors being a source of misunderstanding, gestures too cansometimes be difficult for international students to understand.Why do people use metaphors in conversation?Despite the difficulties they present, the conventional metaphors used byEnglish speakers (and the gestures that accompany them) play important rolesin communication, in everyday conversation as well as in educational contexts.When they use metaphor, speakers do not usually use the form SOMETHINGIS SOMETHING ELSE (as in the ‘Juliet is the sun’ metaphor, mentioned above)when talking to each other, but rather favour verbs and verb phrases (e.g.take something in hand) or noun phrases with ‘of’ (e.g. the mouth of the river).In general people express their meanings metaphorically through the kind ofconventional metaphors mentioned earlier, often fossilised in ‘delexical’ verbslike ‘take’ or ‘go’ accompanied by prepositions or particles (for example, ‘go up’meaning ‘increase’ or ‘take to’ meaning ‘develop a liking for’) (Cameron, 2003). Thatis, the ‘building blocks’ for everyday conventional metaphors are the words mostfrequently used in English – a fact which is both advantageous and problematic forthe non-native speaker of the language.A significant fact about metaphor use is that metaphors are not distributedevenly across conversations, but rather occur in bursts or clusters in response tovarious factors (Cameron and Stelma, 2004). One of these is that metaphors areused more frequently when the topic of conversation is problematic or sensitivein some way. And analysis of conversations has also shown that metaphor fulfillsimportant ideational, interactional and discourse functions when people talk toeach other face to face. Metaphors can be repeated, reworded or challenged inthe course of a conversation (Gibbs and Cameron, 2008), and are often used to‘frame’ a speaker’s stance towards the topic at hand. In conversation betweennative speakers (NSs) of English, metaphor seems to play key roles in discoursemanagement and in expressing evaluative meanings.Why do people use metaphors in university settings?Metaphors are particularly frequent in academic discourse (Steen et al., 2010).Lecturers use metaphors not only to express notions important to their disciplines(for example, ‘floating exchange rates’ and ‘trickle down effects’ in Economics)but also to organise their lectures (‘to wrap this up’, for example) or to encouragecritical or creative thinking (for example, ‘think outside the box’). In tutorials,metaphors are likely to be used when talking about topics such as organising one’sschedule (e.g. ‘cramming’ and ‘struggling to keep up’), planning an assignment(e.g. ‘sticking to the upper limit’), completing assignments (‘meeting a deadline’) orhanding in work (e.g. ‘turn in’), among other things.International Students | 353