Elham Rabi Nezhad - Department of Foreign Languages, Islamic Azad University, Khorasgan Branch, Isfahan, Iran
Mahmood Hashemian - Department of English Language, Faculty of Letters and Humanities, Shahrekord University, Iran

Recent developments in cognitive linguistics have highlighted the importance and the ubiquity of metaphor in language. Their effect has been instrumental in making significant headway intopedagogical practice and the design of teaching materials. This study aimed at exploring the efficacy of focus-on-form(s) instruction on the learning of metaphors by intermediate L2 learners of English. To do so, 80 participants who were homogeneous in terms of language proficiency and metaphoriccompetence were assigned to 3 groups―2 experimental and 1 control groups. One of theexperimental groups was exposed to a 20-session explicit teaching of metaphors (i.e., focus-on-forms) contained in the reading passages. The second group was taught the L2 metaphorical expressions through implicit instruction (i.e., focus-on-form) and was required to guess their meanings. And, thecontrol group did not receive any particular kind of instruction; however, they took the same pretest and posttest as the 2 experimental groups did. To analyze the data, analysis of covariance was utilized. The findings revealed that the explicitly-taught group gained better results on the posttest. Therefore, the results indicated a positive correlation between focus-on-forms instruction and the development ofmetaphorical competence. It could be claimed that it is possible to enhance L2 learners’ metaphorical competence via the explicit teaching of metaphors.