Abstract
In this paper, I will argue that awareness of images and metaphors held by foreign language learners about the nature of the target language and its learning can be of substantial value and provide teaching practitioners with useful insights about how to deal with various language learning problems. To elicit images which learners hold about foreign language learning, a questionnaire was given to 350 learners of English in different places in Iran. The questionnaire asked the respondents to provide images about learning a foreign language by using a sentence completion task: “Learning a foreign language is like . . .” The responses gained in 200 questionnaires were content-analyzed and the identified images and metaphors were summarized under more broad-ranging categories. The information that the metaphors and the resulting metaphorical categories provide and the theoretical interpretations which can plausibly be made are discussed in some detail and put in a cognitive-psychological perspective.
Highlights
The study of language learners’ beliefs and thought processes has been of interest to researchers for several decades and has recently gathered increased momentum (e.g., Berry, 2004; Cotterall, 1999; Finkbeiner, 2003; Fortune, 2005; Hawkins, 1999; Liao, 2006; Svalberg, 2005)
The inspiration for this study comes from conceptual metaphor theory, which assumes that the underlying nature of our thought processes is metaphorical and we think and act in terms of metaphors (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980)
The conceptual metaphor ARGUMENT IS WAR1 can be deduced from linguistic metaphors such as I am sure this position will come under fire from the opposition, and The neighbors agreed to a cease
Summary
The study of language learners’ beliefs and thought processes has been of interest to researchers for several decades and has recently gathered increased momentum (e.g., Berry, 2004; Cotterall, 1999; Finkbeiner, 2003; Fortune, 2005; Hawkins, 1999; Liao, 2006; Svalberg, 2005). Gibbs (2011), evaluating 30 years of conceptual metaphor theory, insists that our common figurative verbalizations are instantiations of specific metaphorical entailments arising from a small closed set of conceptual metaphors shared by many people in a speech community This is basically a reendorsement of the earlier work by Lakoff and Johnson (1980), who specify a list of such basic metaphors. 1189) take the argument one step further and, through a survey of some American English and Brazilian Portuguese speakers, offer evidence that conceptual metaphors are, in turn, “fundamentally rooted in embodied action,” as exemplified by the metaphorical conceptualization of desire in terms of huger (I am starved for his affection) While these observations have vast implications beyond the scope of the present study and involve causal and interactive relationships of metaphor, language, and behavior, they encourage studies of limited scope with the goal of getting insights into the current thinking and behavior of individuals through their metaphors
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