Metaphor Production in Master Students' Academic Writing: A Corpus Based Research The Case of Master Two Students' Dissertations Submitted to Mohamed Boudiaf University of M’Sila

Abstract

ABSTRACT The current study investigates metaphor production in some conclusions of EFL master students' dissertations at the Department of Letters and English Language at M'Sila University, as well as EFL teachers' perceptions of the use of metaphor in students' academic writing. Its primary goal is to discover the evidence for metaphor production in linguistics and literature & civilization dissertations. It also aims to reveal teachers' attitudes toward metaphor production. To accomplish these objectives, we employed Metaphor Identification Procedure (MIP) method to identify and collect metaphors generated by master students. This corpus of the study includes ten dissertations in both fields submitted in 2021 at the Department of Letters and English Language at M’Sila University. The data collected include 202 metaphorical expressions of both disciplines linguistics, civilization and literature. The findings revealed a high use of metaphor in the conclusions of master dissertations. The most frequently used metaphors in both disciplines are "ideas are people" and "life is a journey". On the other hand, teacher’s perceptions questionnaire (TPQ) was used to measure teachers’ perceptions and practices about metaphor and metaphor production in EFL students’ Master dissertations. The finding revealed the low perceptions that EFL teachers hold about metaphor production in master students' academic writing