English Language Teacher Candidates' Perceptions of Language Teachers: A Metaphor Study

Abstract

Metaphor studies are accepted as research tools by general education and language pedagogy scholars in related fields. It is considered that metaphors are useful tools to investigate and construct teacher's professional life. Metaphor studies generally focus on teacher-produced or student-produced metaphor images and qualitative data are used to analyze these images. The current research utilized pre-service English language teacher's metaphor perceptions about English language teachers. Therefore, the participants of the study will be prospective teachers in the future, their perceptions about English language teachers are quite important to investigate their identity building process. The participants of the present research are 128 English language teacher candidates who are first graders of English language teaching department at Gazi University. The data were collected in 2014-2015 academic year. The data were collected through a scale which had been developed by researchers of the study. The scale consists of two part that investigate participants' perceptions through metaphors. The data were analyzed through content analysis. The results show that English language teacher candidates' perceptions vary and mostly positive metaphors were used to describe English language teachers. The current research is significant in terms of understanding English language teacher candidates' perceptions about their future career.