Ideational Metaphor Analysis on EFL Students’ Academic Writing

Abstract

Over the last decade, research on the quality of EFL students' English academic writing has increased. However, research on EFL students' academic writing that incorporates grammatical metaphors is regarded scarce. As such, this study seeks to elucidate the occurrences of ideational metaphors in students' academic writing essays. The qualitative descriptive method was used in this study. This research involved a total of 25 undergraduate students from the University of HKBP Nommensen Medan, Indonesia, English Department, Faculty of Language and Arts, who studied Academic Writing course in the third semester. Students were required to submit a 350-word essay on the subject "Learning Challenges during the Coronavirus Pandemic." The research's data corpus totals 10,252 words. The results indicate that the students' writings contain 281 clauses comprising the ideational metaphor. It is deemed little in comparison to the corpus's overall data set of 10,252 words. Material processes dominate the incidence of ideational metaphors, followed by mental processes, relational processes, behavioral processes, and existential processes. This finding implies that the essay structure of EFL students is unlikely to have a large proportion of solid grammatical metaphor clauses. The pedagogical implication of this research is that EFL students, lecturers, teachers, and other educational practitioners interested in teaching English academic writing should be aware of grammatical metaphors in writing texts as a proxy for the quality of scientifically academic writing.