Metaphor in the Academic Mentoring of International Undergraduate Students: The Erasmus Experience

ABSTRACT Metaphor use in university contexts has received some attention by the literature, which has mostly focussed on the language produced by academics. However, more dialogic forms of academic communications, where students are afforded opportunities for feedback on and discussion of opaque language use, are usually missing in the analyses of applied metaphor researchers. In order to partially redress this imbalance in research into metaphor in academic discourse, this article looks at lecturers’ use of metaphor in one such dialogic type of communication—academic mentoring—and how international students respond to these language uses. I examine the frequency and functions of metaphor in 27 video-recorded conversations between Spanish Erasmus students and their lecturers at five different European universities. My findings reveal that lecturers use metaphor frequently in this context too, but that it does not appear to pose obvious problems for interaction, although misalignments between speakers can be observed.