The Future of Education

Long known as a literary device for poetic expression, metaphor has recently emerged as a popular tool for reflection and data collection in teacher education. Since it enables researchers to develop insights into the subjects’ underlying theories of (future) action, metaphor analysis was used in the current study for investigating how 56 beginning teachers conceptualised language, teaching and coursebooks in the two similar contexts of English and Turkish as a foreign language class (EFL, TFL). Therefore, the EFL and TFL participants were given a list of language-teacher-coursebook metaphors in the literature, and asked to provide an explanation for their preferred images. 168 metaphors, chosen by the two groups of beginning teachers, were examined through the content analysis method, and a comparison of their self-chosen metaphors revealed that: (1) the EFL and TFL participants were equally oriented towards a functional view of language (57%), even though there were more structuralists (32%) in the TFL and interactionists (18%) in the EFL group; (2) despite their traditional view of language, both groups adopted the more egalitarian and transformative roles of the teacher as a cooperative leader (39%, 53.5%) and as an agent of change (32%, 18%) in the L2 class, and (3) the EFL group (46%) showed a greater tendency to assign a guiding role to coursebooks than the TFL group (32%), whereas the more dependent role of the coursebook as resource was appreciated by only 7% of the TFL group and by 29% of the EFL group.

Keywords: beginning teachers, metaphor analysis, teacher education