A CORPUS BASED STUDY OF TURKISH EFL STUDENTS METAPHORICAL LANGUAGE USE IN WRITING

EFL/ESL teachers use various error feedback strategiesto help their students become better writers. Although different kinds ofteacher feedback help students improve their writing in terms of language, someproblems may still persist. In some cases, texts written by non-native speakersof English may sound unnatural not because of incorrect structural or lexicalproblems, but because of figurative/metaphorical language issues. The limitedresearch on metaphorical fluency shows that in language learning environmentmetaphorical competence cannot be identified frequently. Danesi (1995) givesthe reason of this not as learners’ incapability of learning metaphors, but asnot receiving conceptually and linguistically appropriate models. It is largelybelieved that L2 learners need to be exposed to metaphorical language to becomeconceptually fluent (Lan, 2008; Andreou and Galantomos, 2009; Telebinezhad, 2007; Hashemian and Nezhad, 2007;Charteris-Black, 2002; Danesi, 1995). Corus-based metaphorical language use studies mostly comparenative and non-native speaker ratios of metaphorical language in their writtenor oral productions for metaphorical density. They mostly report similarresults for native and non-native groups of different L2 learners (Andreou& Galantomos, 2009; Hashemian & Nezhad, 2006; Danesi, 1995).This study investigated themetaphorical language use of Turkish EFL students at tertiary level with alongitudinal corpus-based approach and aimed to find out the relationshipbetween language proficiency level and the ratio of metaphorical language use,quality of metaphors in terms of being native vs. non-native like, and theinfluence of L1 metaphorical language use. With alongitudinal corpus-based design, 19 Turkish students’ metaphorical languageuse was investigated through their four writing exams during their one-yearintensive English study and a delayed writing test five months after theyfinished the program. In metaphorstudies identifying and analysing metaphorical language use in a corpus raisesome problems. Pitcher (2013) describes metaphor analysis as “a method ofextracting conceptions from texts” (p.1) which is mostly intuition-based whilesome others suggest taxonomies (Crisp etal., 2002; Babarczy et al., 2014). In this study, we used theMetaphor Identification Procedure (MIP) proposed by a group of researchersnamed Pragglejaz Group (2007). It is a mechanical analysis of metaphors interms of checking each word against the literal dictionary definition.According to MIP, if the meaning of a word is not identical to its literaldefinition, it can be considered a metaphor. Steen (2011) defines five steps ofMIP as identification of metaphor-related words, metaphor-related propositions,open metaphorical comparison, analogical structure, and cross-domain mapping.Following these steps, the data were coded for metaphorical language use. Afterthe quantitative analysis of the data, five students were interviewed to findout their orientations for specific results.  The results of the study revealed that the ratio ofmetaphor use consistently decreased in students’ writings, and the differencewas found to be significant between five different time periods (four writtenexams in eight months and the delayed writing task). The increase in languagecompetence in time led to decrease in students’ use of metaphors. It was alsofound that native-like metaphor use outweighed non-native-like metaphor use,and the effect of L1 on non-native-like metaphor use was apparent. The interviewresults show a clear support for these findings in the sense that at higherlevels students prefer to use simple language that they are sure of and avoidcomplexity and uncertainty. The dominance of native-like metaphor use can beattributed to their learning metaphorical language as chunks and using them aschunks when they can/need.  When theywere asked about the reasons for the effect of L1 on their metaphoricallanguage use, they indicated that when they were not allowed to usedictionaries the only source they could rely on was their L1 from which theycould translate into English. Based on these results, it can be contended thatmetaphorical language competence should be an additional component of languagecurriculum/syllabus and ways of increasing the ratio of metaphorical languageuse in parallel with general language competence should be explored.