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JohnLolaJohnLolaJohnYes, you can practice, and it sounds like it will be ok, yeah.Also I can do it by myself because I study at home English, I watchTV every day, I’m reading booksDo you watch the television, do youYesEnglish telly what do you watch?This extract from their conversation is curious. The conversational partners beginby talking about academic work and end up talking about the student’s favouriteTV programmes. What has happened? We would suggest that it is the polysemyof the verb ‘look’ that causes the problem. Lola begins by asserting that she will‘look for’ words on internet, a use of the verb that can be interpreted as literal (shewill indeed use her eyes to find the words on the screen). Her use of ‘look’ seemsto trigger the lecturer’s use of the same verb, followed by ‘at’. Of course, ‘look at’,like ‘look for’ can be interpreted literally (‘look at the PowerPoint slides’) but Johnis using it here in a figurative sense, meaning ‘consider’, ‘think about’. In the sameway, he uses the verbs ‘say’ or ‘talk about’ in non-literal ways. But Lola, who isprobably thinking about lectures in which students do ‘look at’ the visual displaysused by lecturers and listen to what they ‘say’ and ‘talk about’, does not recognisethese as metaphors but rather interprets them literally – which, for her, leadsnaturally to another source of visual and verbal information: the television. Thus,repeating and elaborating on each other’s words may help provide coherenceto a conversation and allow participants to develop a topic (‘look for’ is repeatedand elaborated as ‘look at’), but when this involves metaphor, the possibilities formisunderstanding are high, if interlocutors are not aware that each may be usingthe same words with literal rather than metaphorical senses, and vice versa.What happens when metaphorical gestures are misunderstood?The use of gesture to accompany one’s metaphors can also cause problems, asis illustrated in the following extract from a tutorial. In this extract, the lectureruses an upward-pointing gesture to accompany her speech when talking about‘outward-looking’ organisations. In fact she uses this gesture twice to accompanythe same phrase, as she is indicating the top part of a diagram on a flipchart,which represents different types of organisations:http://youtu.be/muvL_eCEMwsAlicesome have a very inward focus and some have a very ^ outwardfocus…370 | International Students