What lies beneath teacher beliefs? A study on metaphoric perceptions

The purpose of this qualitative study is to examine the metaphors a foreign language teacher used to describe her teaching experience and the role she adopted. The study tries to follow the conceptualizations of an experienced EFL teacher in regard to her teaching experience and the role she adopted. The data for the present study were collected by means of metaphor elicitation sheet, interview, and diary. The data were collected every month over a period of 24 months. The results revealed that during the first period of data collection (12 months), the participant teacher developed 10 different metaphors with regard to the concept of “teacher”. The number of new metaphors developed in the second period of data collection (the second 12 months) was 7, most of which implied the democratic teacher. Even though the same metaphor was used at different times, the rationale behind using the same metaphor always yielded differences