Ideational Metaphor in Saudi EFL Students’ Academic Writing: A Systemic-Functional Linguistic Analysis

Abstract

Over the past decade, there has been an upsurge in studies on the quality of EFL students' English academic writing. However, research on grammatical metaphors in academic writing by EFL students is limited. As such, the purpose of this research is to identify the occurrences of ideational metaphors in students' academic writing essays. In this research, the qualitative descriptive approach was applied. This study included 20 undergraduate students from the English Language and Literature Department at the College of Science and Humanities in Shaqra University, Saudi Arabia, Essay Writing course in the fourth level. Students were to write 350-word essay on the subject of "Learning Difficulties During the Coronavirus Pandemic". The data corpus for the study totals 8,482 words. According to the findings, the students' essays include 408 sentences that comprise the ideational metaphor. It is considered insignificant in contrast to the corpus's full data set of 8,482 words. The occurrence of ideational metaphors is dominated by material processes, followed by mental processes, relational processes, behavioral processes, and existential processes. This conclusion shows that EFL students' essay structures are unlikely to have a high number of good grammatical metaphor clauses. For EFL students, lecturers, teachers, and other educational professionals involved in instructing English academic writing, this study has pedagogical implications; it sheds light on how grammatical metaphors in writing texts can serve as a stand-in for the caliber of writing used in academic and scientific literature.