Özet:

The purpose of this study is to understand university preparatory class students' mental images about their English language instructors through metaphors. With regard to this aim, 148 students enrolled in 16 different programs were required to write metaphors on the metaphor elicitation task including the statement "my English instructor is like........................because.................................". Metaphor analysis technique including naming, elimination, deciding unit of analysis, categorization, quantitative analysis of data was employed for the analysis. 153 metaphors were sorted into 9 conceptual themes. While ‘teacher as nurturer’ was the leading category with 40 metaphors, ‘teacher as someone good-hearted’ followed it with 37 metaphors. It was seen that male participants emphasized good-hearted nature of language instructors and their ability to provide knowledge whereas female participants focused on their teachers’ nurturer side. A closer interaction between the instructors and students could be attributed to the reason why students mostly had positive views concerning their language instructors.

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