‘"If English were a person, it would be"’: Exploring Learners’ Affective Metaphors in EMI Contexts of EFL Identity Construction

While substantial research on metaphor in education has focused on cognitive dimensions, conceptualising two ideational domains through mental mapping (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980; Kövecses, 2002), the role of affective metaphors in shaping students’ emotional positioning in English-Medium Instruction (EMI) environments remains largely underexplored. These metaphors, linked to the interpersonal metafunction of language (Halliday, 1994), offer critical insights into how learners relate emotionally and attitudinally to English when used as the primary language of instruction. Drawing on Bakhtin’s (1981) concept of the prosaic and Cameron’s (2003) work on metaphor in educational discourse, this study investigates the metaphorical constructions employed by university students engaged in EMI settings to express their relationship with English. Forty EFL students anonymously participated in a Padlet-based reflective task (Cangero & Cavaliere, 2025), prompted to complete the sentence “If English were a person, it would be…” The resulting EFL Feelings and Metaphor (EFLFM) Corpus (11,068 tokens) was uploaded to Sketch Engine (Kilgarriff et al., 2014) for a mixed-methods analysis. Preliminary results reveal a rich spectrum of metaphorical conceptualisations. A substantial group of participants frame English through type-specific relationship metaphors, drawing on domains such as friendship, romantic involvement, parent-child dynamics and siblinghood. Other participants, however, refrain from explicitly labelling the relationship type, opting instead for evaluative descriptors that reveal attitudinal positioning, such as toxic, ambivalent or utilitarian. Interestingly, friendship metaphors were often associated with feelings of comfort, progress and emotional security, while romantic and ambivalent metaphors indexed higher levels of vulnerability, idealisation or emotional oscillation. Utilitarian metaphors, by contrast, foregrounded instrumental motivations tied to career or communicative efficiency. These findings highlight how metaphor functions not only as a cognitive mapping device, but as an affective lens through which learners negotiate their evolving linguistic identities and emotional investments in the L2.