Plunging into a world? A novel approach to undergraduates’ metaphors of reading

Although there is considerable research on and knowledge about students’ conceptual-izations of learning or academic practices and skills, the variability of these conceptu-alizations has been consistently neglected.In the present study, we address this varia-bility in the field of academic readingwith the help of a novel approach. Drawing on qualitative metaphor analysis, we report a detailed system of students’ conceptual met-aphors of reading. Ourspecific methodologicalapproach to identify the structure of these conceptual metaphorsallowsto analyze subjective agency on a lexical as well as grammatical level.The conceptual metaphors we identified by this method are markedly variable, although they create an overall impression of medium to low agency, that is a reader who is only weakly active or potent. Interrater reliability of the coding system was very good. We also report and analyze the frequency of the conceptual metaphors ina sample of 143 texts written by bachelor students.