earticle

영어

Examining the metaphors we use to discuss a certain topic can shed light on how we feel about that topic beyond the words themselves. Metaphor analysis as a type of discourse analysis is well established. Metaphor analysis applied to the discourse of education has revolved around certain conceptual metaphors such as, ‘students are customers / clients / products / employees’, ‘education is a service’, and other business related metaphors. This paper examines the use of metaphor in 415 articles concerning English education in Korea taken from two major English-language Korean newspapers over the past five years. The results show that the most popular metaphors in regards to the topic are, ‘English education is a burden or weight’, ‘English education is an object crammed into a container’, ‘English education is a stress or strain’, and ‘English education is a fever’. These are not generally positive associations. Other metaphors identified in this study can be mostly categorized as negative. These findings can tell us a great deal about attitudes, explicit and implicit, towards English education in South Korea