Constructing and developing ESL students’ beliefs about writing through metaphor: An exploratory study

• The study investigated the effects of sharing and discussing metaphors for self-writing beliefs on a group of ESL students’ writing beliefs and related writing practices.
• The results supported the pedagogical usefulness of the metaphor-oriented intervention in improving ESL students’ writing.
• The metaphor-oriented intervention can be an effective pedagogical tool for teaching ESL writing.

The paper adopted an explorative stance, investigating an iterative intervention whether sharing with peers personal beliefs about ESL academic writing, by means of explicit metaphors that participants had created individually, would (or would not) lead them to change both their understanding and conceptions of the academic writing they had to do and their writing practices. In the study reported here, seven Chinese MA students constructed personal writing metaphors to represent their beliefs about ESL writing, and then engaged with peers’ metaphors in a set of group discussions for an academic year. The results show that such a metaphor-oriented intervention can be a useful pedagogical tool in helping students improve their writing in at least three ways: broadening their conceptions and understandings of various aspects of academic writing; practising thinking critically about their own writing, and leading to positive changes in their beliefs about academic writing and their own writing practices. The findings also provide evidence in support of the metaphor-oriented intervention, as a useful means, which ESL writing teachers can employ to (1) identify influential metaphors of writing, such as the reader's perspective emphasised by “writing as a tour” metaphor, to help learners make sense of abstract conceptions of writing; (2) become acquainted with students’ writing beliefs and related writing practices, and bridge any gap between their own and students’ expectations, which in turn can inform the teaching of writing; (3) diagnose individuals’ writing difficulties; (4) improve feedback from peers about the process of writing; and (5) train students to think critically about their writing practices.