Creating Metaphor: stimulating concrete idea

Many students love to compose poem. Through a poem, they can express their deep feeling and
thought. Commonly, they are often absorbed in their process of writing. They are emotionally engaged
in the process of defining themselves through the medium of language. It definitely shows that they
have found a medium to express their intimate feeling and experience. However, most of them lacks
ability to control their language by choosing abstract words in their composition.

Meanwhile, writing a poem actually is a process to transform the abstract idea into the concrete object.
The usage of figurative language in a poem is intended not only to deepen its meaning but also to
concretize it.

This article shows my method to teach my students how to write a poem by using a simple concept of
simile and metaphor. Both of them, simile and metaphor, involve a process of making comparison of
two or more objects. Simile is indirect comparison. Meanwhile metaphor is direct comparison. Creating
metaphor and simile concerns with the usage of noun since the compared objects are represented by
nouns. These can be used as tools which enable the students to transform their abstract idea into the
real one. Therefore, their ideas could be grasped by reader’s eyes, nose, skin, tongue, and ear that will
make it easier to catch their meaning.

I employ task based approach to encourage the students to experience the process of finding. They are
challenged to create simile and metaphor based on their own life experience. Their experience functions
as the raw material that stimulates new and unpredicted idea. It involves three phase of task discussed
in the next section.

Initial phase : enriching vocabulary

In this initial phase, the students are asked to mention and write an abstract and concrete noun. They
should divide them into two columns for categories: one for writing the abstract noun and the other is
for the concrete noun. Each student should write a different noun from his friends. They are free to give
any abstract and concrete noun as long as it has not been written by their friends. This process aims to
enrich their vocabulary.

Abstract Noun Conrete Noun

Freedom Ocean

After they have completed the initial phase, the students are asked to describe and write down the
characteristic of their written concrete nouns by answering the following questions:

What is its color ?

How does it smell ?
How is its shape ?
How is its voice or the sound ?
What can it be done ?
How is its taste ?
How do you think of it ?
Those questions function as a guidance that can be developed further by asking more detail questions..
It aims to encourage the students to think the object concretely.

Concrete noun Characteristics

Computer It should be programmed, it has many
applications. It can save the data in its particular
gigabytes memory. It depends on electricity.

The comparing phase : figurative language construction

In this phase, the students are asked to select an abstract noun and a concrete noun randomly and to
compare them directly to form metaphor or indirectly to create simile. To make it easier, they are
directed to fill the following tables:

Personification table

Abstract Noun To be Concrete Noun

Eg. happiness Is A bus

Simile table

Abstract Noun To be + like Concrete Noun

sadness Is like rain

The final phase: activating imagination

The final step is actually combining the initial and the comparing phase. It is directed to create simile
and metaphor by applying the principle of association. The student should link the abstract to the
concrete noun by imagining the possible associations. The students should be encouraged to associate a
particular abstract noun to a specific concrete noun. This association process is done based on the free
choice principle. It means that they are free to pick any noun to be associated. aimagine those links It
should be done freely and