Akademik Veri Yönetim Sistemi
LCR 2015, Nijmegen, Hollanda, 11 - 13 Eylül 2015
EFL/ESL teachers use various error feedback strategies
to help their students become better writers. Although different kinds of
teacher feedback help students improve their writing in terms of language, some
problems may still persist. In some cases, texts written by non-native speakers
of English may sound unnatural not because of incorrect structural or lexical
problems, but because of figurative/metaphorical language issues. The limited
research on metaphorical fluency shows that in language learning environment
metaphorical competence cannot be identified frequently. Danesi (1995) gives
the reason of this not as learners’ incapability of learning metaphors, but as
not receiving conceptually and linguistically appropriate models. It is largely
believed that L2 learners need to be exposed to metaphorical language to become
conceptually fluent (Lan, 2008; Andreou and Galantomos, 2009; Telebinezhad, 2007; Hashemian and Nezhad, 2007;
Charteris-Black, 2002; Danesi, 1995). Corus-based metaphorical language use studies mostly compare
native and non-native speaker ratios of metaphorical language in their written
or oral productions for metaphorical density. They mostly report similar
results for native and non-native groups of different L2 learners (Andreou
& Galantomos, 2009; Hashemian & Nezhad, 2006; Danesi, 1995).
This study investigated the
metaphorical language use of Turkish EFL students at tertiary level with a
longitudinal corpus-based approach and aimed to find out the relationship
between language proficiency level and the ratio of metaphorical language use,
quality of metaphors in terms of being native vs. non-native like, and the
influence of L1 metaphorical language use. With a
longitudinal corpus-based design, 19 Turkish students’ metaphorical language
use was investigated through their four writing exams during their one-year
intensive English study and a delayed writing test five months after they
finished the program. In metaphor
studies identifying and analysing metaphorical language use in a corpus raise
some problems. Pitcher (2013) describes metaphor analysis as “a method of
extracting conceptions from texts” (p.1) which is mostly intuition-based while
some others suggest taxonomies (Crisp et
al., 2002; Babarczy et al., 2014).
In this study, we used the
Metaphor Identification Procedure (MIP) proposed by a group of researchers
named Pragglejaz Group (2007). It is a mechanical analysis of metaphors in
terms of checking each word against the literal dictionary definition.
According to MIP, if the meaning of a word is not identical to its literal
definition, it can be considered a metaphor. Steen (2011) defines five steps of
MIP as identification of metaphor-related words, metaphor-related propositions,
open metaphorical comparison, analogical structure, and cross-domain mapping.
Following these steps, the data were coded for metaphorical language use. After
the quantitative analysis of the data, five students were interviewed to find
out their orientations for specific results.
The results of the study revealed that the ratio of
metaphor use consistently decreased in students’ writings, and the difference
was found to be significant between five different time periods (four written
exams in eight months and the delayed writing task). The increase in language
competence in time led to decrease in students’ use of metaphors. It was also
found that native-like metaphor use outweighed non-native-like metaphor use,
and the effect of L1 on non-native-like metaphor use was apparent. The interview
results show a clear support for these findings in the sense that at higher
levels students prefer to use simple language that they are sure of and avoid
complexity and uncertainty. The dominance of native-like metaphor use can be
attributed to their learning metaphorical language as chunks and using them as
chunks when they can/need. When they
were asked about the reasons for the effect of L1 on their metaphorical
language use, they indicated that when they were not allowed to use
dictionaries the only source they could rely on was their L1 from which they
could translate into English. Based on these results, it can be contended that
metaphorical language competence should be an additional component of language
curriculum/syllabus and ways of increasing the ratio of metaphorical language
use in parallel with general language competence should be explored.