Grammatical Metaphors Of EFL Doctoral Students

This study explores grammatical metaphors in the English writings of EFLdoctoral students within the theoretical framework of Systemic-functionallinguistics so as to better understand the features of EFL doctoral students’deployment of grammatical metaphors on different levels of English proficiency.The non-experimental comparative study, combining qualitative and quantitativemethods, collected thirty English essays written by EFL doctoral students, andconducted six individual interviews with them. Data analysis involved contentanalysis method and thematic analysis method. The former was employed toanalyze the thirty essays while the latter was used to scrutinize interview data.The findings of the study are stated as follows:1. EFL doctoral students of high English proficiency tend to use moregrammatical metaphor than the students of medium and low Englishproficiency in terms of diversified forms and strong grammatical control.The features of grammatical metaphor used by students with differentEnglish proficiency are summaries as follows:1) Compared withdoctoral students of low and medium English proficiency, high Englishproficiency students tend to use more ideational grammatical metaphorwith stronger grammatical control. However, there seem to be nosignificant difference in the deployment of interpersonal metaphor andtextual metaphor.2) Compared with students of low English proficiency,medium English proficiency students appear to be more capable of usingideational and interpersonal metaphors. Regarding the deployment oftextual metaphor, no significant difference is identified between the twogroups of students.2. Regardless of English proficiency, similarities are found in EFL doctoralstudents’ use of grammatical metaphor:1) Ideational metaphor seems tobe the most frequently used type, the grammatical control of which is also the strongest.2) Although interpersonal metaphor is used more thantextual metaphor, EFL doctoral students’ use of interpersonal metaphorfollows a fixed pattern.3) In EFL doctoral students’ English essays, thefrequency and the grammatical control of textual metaphor are the lowest.Fixed pattern is found in the realizations of text cohesion, which lacksdiversity.3. EFL doctoral students have weak perception on the function ofgrammatical metaphor, which results in the underuse or misuse ofgrammatical metaphor.To conclude,1) EFL doctoral students of different English proficiencydemonstrate differences and similarities in their deployment of grammaticalmetaphors.2) EFL doctoral students’ awareness of grammatical metaphor appearsto be weak which to some extent affects their use of grammatical metaphor. Thepedagogical implication of the study lies in that English education should attachimportance to EFL students’ awareness of grammatical metaphor, especially theawareness of textual metaphor in order to enhance their interculturalcommunicative competence for academic purposes.