The Importance of Using Metaphors in Foreign Language Teaching and Learning
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.53103/cjlls.v1i2.17Keywords:
Metaphor, English, Foreign Language, TurkeyAbstract
So far various studies on language teaching and learning have been conducted to explore the teachers’ perceptions of their professional practice. However, there are only a few of them focus on student-produced metaphors related to the process of foreign language. Researchers have studied how teachers’ metaphors affect their methods and strategies in order to understand the complex processes of teaching in a classroom environment. Metaphors not only include crucial information about teachers’ growth as professionals but also reveal their educational values, beliefs, and principles. Personal beliefs play a significant role in teachers’ classroom practice, which are the result of their self-construction. This study attempts to explain the importance and effectiveness of using metaphors in foreign language teaching and learning. 52 university students in the department of Teaching Mathematics and Turkish attending in the 1st class in Gazi University Faculty of Education, Ankara, in Turkey. With the help of content analysis, we tried to investigate students’ attitudes towards English course by using metaphors. While a conceptual metaphor program is being designed in this study, we found out that figurative language is not incidental but omnipresent in daily language. This ubiquity of metaphors and idioms is concerned with the high proficiency of figurative language. The results of the study indicate that metaphor awareness of understanding idiomatic expressions is highly significant in foreign language.
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