This study analyses the characterisation and evolution of the personal metaphors of a sample of 34 trainee foreign language teachers, through a questionnaire of open-ended questions that included asking the participants to make drawings representing the roles of the teacher. Four categories of metaphors were considered for the analysis:…

This study investigates the effectiveness of Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT)-based instruction in enhancing vocabulary acquisition and learner interest among Chinese university students learning English as a Foreign Language (EFL). Using a quasi-experimental design, 73 undergraduates were divided into an experimental group (n = 37) receiving…

Social media is widely used in many different sectors worldwide. In language education, it can impact students' language learning, and students may have diverse opinions about its use. This study aimed to explore how Thai university students conceptualise social media and their perceptions of it. An elicitation task, "social media is like ……

Research has identified a particularly useful lexicogrammatical resource that language learners need in order to develop academic literacy, that of grammatical metaphor (GM). GM enables the wordy expression characteristic of informal, spoken discourses to be reorganized into the cohesive and abstracted expression valued in academic texts. Although…

Analogies of the biotic modality within the technical sphere center on notions of vitality, differentiation of function, organization, adaptation and development. On the norm side, these organic analogies allow us to envision technical norms for the development of applied linguistic artefacts, which underlie the coming to fruition and maturation…

"A Dictionary and Thesaurus of Contemporary Figurative Language and Metaphor" (2024) upgrades ED628218 (ERIC) with labels and analysis and brings the work up to date to reflect language change at the speed of the internet, ChatGPT, social discord, and bloody wars. The dictionary identifies language used figuratively in everyday…

The relation between English language teaching and religion has not been given sufficient attention. Most of the existing explorations of this relationship have tended to reify Western-biased outlooks of this phenomenon, which rightly highlight serious moral dilemmas derived from a focus on Christian evangelization, neo-imperialist dynamics…

Although teachers have access to a great deal of scholarship on teaching academic vocabulary (AV), much less is known about the experiences and perceptions of English language learners regarding AV. To address this gap, we used an online metaphor elicitation survey and follow-up interviews to collect data from 432 undergraduates at a Hong Kong…

Most L1 (first language) Japanese speakers in Japan seem to think that they are monolingual. While it appears that Japanese people accept monolingual-ness as normative in the nation, there is little situated understanding of what makes up this Japanese monolingual-ness. This study reports on repeated, long, and mostly unstructured interviews with…

"A Dictionary of Contemporary Figurative Language" is meant to be an appendix to an earlier, more comprehensive work: ED648945, "A Dictionary and Thesaurus of Contemporary Figurative Language and Metaphor 2024." This appendix simply updates the dictionary of that previous work to better reflect the language used during the 2024…

"A Dictionary and Thesaurus of Contemporary Figurative Language and Metaphor" (2023) upgrades ED619049 (ERIC) and finishes its work. The dictionary identifies language used figuratively in everyday contemporary English--to include the language of "inclusion & exclusion" and "contempo-speak"--along with its…

This chapter deals with a small-scale study that focuses on the analysis of the student teachers' evidence gathered from the first task of the Barcelona study week of the proPIC project. The task, called 'One picture and One thousand words', consists of selecting an image that represents the student teachers' conception of Additional Language (AL)…

Recent research on second or additional language (L2) pragmatics instruction in study abroad has incorporated the technique of encouraging students to gather data about pragmatics, for example, by asking members of the host country to complete questionnaires, practice using pragmatic features, or answer questions about pragmatics (e.g., Hernández,…

There has been an increased interest among researchers concerning the relationship between faith and English language teaching (ELT) in the context of the global spread of English; however, to this date, very few studies have focused on ELT and Islam. Considering the wider sociopolitical, ideological or religious issues connected to the global…

"Variability" and "fractality," two key concepts in Complex Dynamic Systems Theory (CDST)--the former concerning changes and variations, and the latter concerning recursiveness and self-similarities--may seem contradictory at first glance. This forum piece attempts to elucidate how the two seemingly contradictory properties can…