‘ … Like white light going through a prism’: a metaphorical exploration of multilingual education from teachers’ perspectives

Various characteristics of multilingual educational settings have been investigated from diverse sources thus far; however, the metaphorical representation of these unique mini-societies has been overlooked and warrants greater attention. Therefore, grounded in a metaphorical standpoint, this study aimed to explore the underlying factors involved in multilingual education by analyzing teachers’ metaphors about it. To collect data, 67 teachers from a university in Türkiye, chosen through snowball sampling, completed a metaphor about multilingual education. Of these, 12 teachers participated in semi-structured interviews to elaborate on the metaphors they generated. Employing systematic metaphor analysis, the metaphors were categorized into six distinctive themes: travel, residence, edibles, art and entertainment, artifact, and career. Then, the thematic analysis of interview data indicated unique features of multilingual classrooms embedded within the provided metaphors and their underlying dimensions. These findings call for educational reforms in multilingual education for teachers, teacher educators, and policymakers by unveiling the unique features of this specific educational context.