Metaphoric Modeling of Foreign Language Teaching and Learning, with Special Reference to Teaching Philosophy Statements

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.