Metaphor in the Academic Mentoring of International Undergraduate Students: The Erasmus Experience

ABSTRACT

Metaphor use in university contexts has received some attention by the literature, which has mostly focussed on the language produced by academics. However, more dialogic forms of academic communications, where students are afforded opportunities for feedback on and discussion of opaque language use, are usually missing in the analyses of applied metaphor researchers. In order to partially redress this imbalance in research into metaphor in academic discourse, this article looks at lecturers’ use of metaphor in one such dialogic type of communication—academic mentoring—and how international students respond to these language uses. I examine the frequency and functions of metaphor in 27 video-recorded conversations between Spanish Erasmus students and their lecturers at five different European universities. My findings reveal that lecturers use metaphor frequently in this context too, but that it does not appear to pose obvious problems for interaction, although misalignments between speakers can be observed.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the two anonymous reviewers for their insighful comments and Fiona MacArthur for her ideas and support in the drafting of the article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ These were tokens used for generating word lists, and did not include items not found in dictionaries, such as hesitation markers like mhm or the orthographic representation of speaker sounds, such as haeh. This figure also comprises the (few) words spoken by the researchers in three conversations to give an indication to the participants about the timing of the session. The tokenization process and the identification of multiword units were carried out using Wmatrix and the MacMillan English Dictionary for Advanced Learners.

² The exception to this was the L1 Greek lecturer in UE3, who used “sort of” before words used metaphorically and non-metaphorically.

³ For reasons of readability, excerpts from the transcripts have been greatly simplified. Access to the full transcripts can be obtained at www.eurocoat.es.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Spanish Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovacion [FFI2011-22809].