Multimodal metaphors in educational animated videos /

The rapidly changing perspectives and demands of pupils challenge educators to come up with new ways to explain complex concepts, one of which is the use of animated videos that focus on teaching viewers about those concepts. Studies find that animation stimulates interest in learning and benefits students with autism spectrum disorder. Metaphor is one of the components of these videos that helps portray novel or strange phenomena in a way that would seem more familiar and engaging to the learner. Metaphors have been used in education even in writings of philosophical authors, such as Aristotle, Epicurus, and Lucretius, among others. After researching the topic, it seems that there have been studies conducted on metaphors in education, metaphors in animation and the benefits of using animation in education, however, there have been very few studies on metaphors in educational animations. Hence, the aim of this paper was to analyse animated educational videos from the YouTube channel Kurzgesagt, categorize them into subjects explained in the videos and see how the multimodal metaphors extracted benefit the explanation. Twenty videos from the playlist about medicine and biology were found to have at least one occurrence of multimodal metaphor. Out of the following categories: GMO, animals, health dangers, cancer, intelligence and energy, immunity and health – the most videos were about immunity and health, and out of all the analysed videos the source domain of war was found to be the most prevalent. Other source domains occurred much less frequently, mostly only once, suggesting that the metaphors used in the animated videos are very specific and diverse. It was found that multimodal metaphors were only a small contributor to explaining the complex subject matter of the videos and further research would need to be done in order to conclude how the metaphors influence the viewers’ understanding of the topics those videos deal with.

Grantor dc:publisher

Institutional Repository of Vilnius University

Year dc:date

2024

Author dc:creator

• Bekėžaitė, Brigita,

• multimodal metaphors, animated videos, educational videos, health, war metaphors, immune system, multimodalinės metaforos, edukaciniai vaizdo įrašai, animuoti vaizdo įrašai, sveikata, karo metaforos, imunitetas

Statement dc:rights

• info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess

Language dc:language

eng

Repository record dc:identifier

https://repository.vu.lt/VU:ELABAETD210585848&prefLang=en_US

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:vu.lt:elaba:210585848