A Dialogic Approach to Teacher and Learner Beliefs about Language Learning: A Metaphor Analysis

This study aims to investigate beliefs about language learning by comparing the teacher, learner and language learning metaphors produced by language lecturers and language major students at a Turkish state university. Metaphor serves as a crucial asset in understanding conceptualisations of students’ and teachers’ beliefs. 9 language instructors and 45 freshman students of the Translation and Interpreting programme in the 2023-2024 academic year participated voluntarily in the study. An open-ended metaphor elicitation form that had questions like “A teacher should be like... because …” “A language learner is like…because…” “Learning a language is like … because…”, and a follow-up individual interview was used. The reasons were analysed meticulously as different parties used the identical metaphor, but the justification they provided was different, so they were classified by the rationale behind not only the source metaphor. The results revealed matches and mismatches between the learners’ and lecturers’ interpretations of teacher/learner roles and language learning. The elicited metaphors provided insightful results about learner/teacher beliefs and the gaps in between. Having a dialogic approach to learner/teacher beliefs will help resolve the conflicts between the two groups and lead to a better understanding of student expectations; thus, educators and practitioners can revise their teaching practices accordingly and be open to improving them. This study can be considered as an attempt to bridge the gap between different parties and provides implications for language teaching and learning practices as well as for language educators, curriculum designers and policymakers at the tertiary level.