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The current article investigates teachers' metaphoric modeling of foreign language teaching and learning at the College of Languages and Translation, King Saud University. It makes use of teaching philosophy statements as a corpus. Our objective is to analyze the underlying conceptualizations of teaching/learning, the teachers' perception of the students, and the teachers' self-perception. To do so, we have adopted a mixture of qualitative and quantitative methods. The framework adopted is Lakoff and Johnson's cognitive theory of metaphor, in particular the primacy of the conceptual over the linguistic, the power of metaphor to highlight and hide experience, and metaphor's inferential system of entailments. The conceptualizations of the domain of foreign language teaching and learning are then measured against concepts in the philosophy of education such as teacher centeredness, student centeredness, and learning centeredness, using cost-benefit analyses.

The current article investigates teachers' metaphoric modeling of foreign language teaching and learning at the College of Languages and Translation, King Saud University. It makes use of teaching philosophy statements as a corpus. Our objective is to analyze the underlying conceptualizations of teaching/learning, the teachers' perception of the students, and the teachers' self-perception. To do so, we have adopted a mixture of qualitative and quantitative methods. The framework adopted is Lakoff and Johnson's cognitive theory of metaphor, in particular the primacy of the conceptual over the linguistic, the power of metaphor to highlight and hide experience, and metaphor's inferential system of entailments. The conceptualizations of the domain of foreign language teaching and learning are then measured against concepts in the philosophy of education such as teacher centeredness, student centeredness, and learning centeredness, using cost--benefit analyses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study is part of a larger project by the authors of the current article and their co-author on the role of metaphor in the conceptualization of the components of the learning processii such as learning per se, the student, and the teacher. The current article addresses the conceptualization of teachers by their own students at the College of Languages and Translation (COLT), King Saud University. In particular, the article elicits data from 173 students through the following prompt: "Write a narrative in which you describe student-teacher relations according to your experience as a student in higher education, giving your opinion based on concrete cases." The objective of the study is to measure the weight of metaphor in teacher-student relations. The collected data is analyzed through the contemporary theory of metaphor (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980), which allows for a search for the conceptual metaphors (CMs) underlying the narratives. Data analysis follows the qualitative method, which is confirmed with quantitative percentile counts. The findings reveal a set of conflictive student-generated metaphors, but mostly evaluating teachers positively according to affective style criteria such as familial, social, and interpersonal factors. Such findings should be used as an indicator to decision makers to consolidate what is positive and improve what is less positive to enhance learning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]