SPATIAL METAPHORS AND WRITING HYPERTEXTS - STUDYING SCHOOL LESSONS

This article deals with the writing of hypertext during regular school lessons. We suppose that the writing of hypertext promotes the compre hension of semantic relationships within a subject and the reflection about knowledge structures. From research on learning by writing tradi tional texts, it can be expected that the constitutive features of ''h ypertexts'' must be comprehensible for learners. In this study, we foc us in particular on the question: Which metaphors are helpful to intro duce the main idea of ''hypertext''? In an explorative field study, we examined two parallel classes constructing hypertexts during their re gular school lessons. The teachers in both classes used completely dif ferent metaphors to introduce the concept of hypertext. The metaphor c hosen influenced both the structures of the completed hypertext-docume nts and the discussion about the subject matter. The space-metaphor se ems to be especially appropriate to introduce the concept of hypertext to the learner in such a way that a creative interaction between the structure of the hypertext and the semantic structure of the subject c ould result. Three tests were administered to measure the degree to wh ich knowledge about semantic relations and structures was acquired. Th e class that had discussed hypertext with spatial metaphors showed sig nificantly better results than the parallel class.