Phyo Wai Mar, Nikolov Marianne, Hódi Ágnes
Doctoral Student, Doctoral School of Education, University of Szeged, Szeged, Hungary.
Professor Emerita, Department of English Applied Linguistics, University of Pécs, Pécs, Hungary.
Heliyon. 2023 Jan 31;9(2):e13293. doi: 10.1016/j.heliyon.2023.e13293. eCollection 2023 Feb.
Doctoral students are expected to contribute to their academic community by presenting their research findings in an internationally acceptable manner and to submit their dissertation. Students from non-English-speaking backgrounds might face challenges when writing publishable papers and dissertations in English. The aim of this study is to explore conceptual metaphors doctoral students used for characterizing their English academic writing experiences during their doctoral studies. A survey was conducted in the spring of 2022 inviting all non-native English-speaking doctoral students. They were asked to finish the sentence: "Writing an academic paper in English is like …..". A total of 255 doctoral students (125 females; 127 males; 3 not stated) studying at 14 Hungarian universities volunteered to participate. They were from 49 countries and used 52 mother tongues. The metaphor dataset was analyzed following Lakoff and Johnson' (1980) theoretical framework. Ten conceptual domains emerged from the dataset: WORK, TEXT PRODUCTION, CHALLENGE, STRUGGLE, CHANGING PLACES, ACTIVITIY, NOURISMENT, EASY TASK, CONSTRUCTION, and COMPLEX PROCESS. Only four students shared very negative metaphors on their experiences; whereas most students' metaphors reflected optimism, even though they implied various demanding features of English academic writing. Students' metaphors offered new authentic insights into their emic perspectives on their lived experiences.
博士生需要以国际认可的方式展示他们的研究成果，并提交论文，以此为学术社区做出贡献。来自非英语背景的学生在用英语撰写可发表的论文和论文时可能会面临挑战。本研究的目的是探索博士生在博士学习期间用于描述其英语学术写作经历的概念隐喻。2022年春季进行了一项调查，邀请了所有非英语母语的博士生。他们被要求完成这样一个句子：“用英语写学术论文就像……”。共有255名在14所匈牙利大学学习的博士生（125名女性；127名男性；3名未说明性别）自愿参与。他们来自49个国家，使用52种母语。隐喻数据集是按照莱考夫和约翰逊（1980）的理论框架进行分析的。数据集中出现了十个概念领域：工作、文本创作、挑战、挣扎、易地、活动、滋养、轻松任务、构建和复杂过程。只有四名学生分享了关于他们经历的非常负面的隐喻；而大多数学生的隐喻反映了乐观态度，尽管这些隐喻暗示了英语学术写作的各种苛刻特征。学生的隐喻为他们对生活经历的本土视角提供了新的真实见解。
