Extramural English and metaphor production in L2 English : A study on the production of metaphors by Swedish EFL students’ writing in relation to their extramural English activities

Sammanfattning

The aim of this study is to investigate whether students’ dominant extramural English (EE) activity (social media use, gaming and reading) are associated with differences in metaphor production in written learner English. The data consists of learner texts from the SLEC (Swedish Learner English Corpus). The method used to identify metaphors was MIP (Metaphor Identification Procedure), while Lakoff and Johnson’s (1980) conceptual metaphor theory served as the analytical framework for understanding metaphors. The results showed that there are some differences in the number of metaphors used across groups, with the most common being that social media users produced both the highest number of metaphors, and the highest number of unique metaphors, followed by gamers and then readers. These differences were deemed too small to indicate any significant difference in metaphor production across the three groups. A closer analysis of the metaphors used also showed that there were no significant differences in the types of metaphors used by the groups. Instead, it appeared that most metaphors across the groups followed similar patterns. This suggests that EE activity may not correlate with differences in metaphor production. However, this is a small-scale study, and a larger scale study may yield different results. Despite the results showing no significant differences the present study gives an insight into learners’ use of metaphors.