Using a metaphor task to explore TESOL students’ beliefs about the roles of teachers

Students enrolled in language teacher education hold beliefs about the roles of language teachers based on their prior experience as learners and possibly as instructors. This study examined if such beliefs change over time. Forty-nine international students from China attending a TESOL program in Canada were asked to provide metaphors for what they considered a good language teacher, and to explain why they thought their metaphors were fitting. The participants performed the metaphor task at the beginning of their program and again nine months later. For the purpose of comparison, 20 Belgian students attending a TESOL program at a university in their home country were also given the same task twice. There was little overlap between these collections of metaphors collected at the two sites, but most of the reasons the two groups gave for their metaphors pointed to similar teacher roles or attributes. Although some participants proposed a greater number of metaphors when they were nine months into their programs than at the beginning, there were few indications of changes in either group's conceptions of the roles of language teachers over time. The article acknowledges the limitations of a metaphor-elicitation task and illustrates the importance of asking respondents to clarify their metaphors.