Benboudriou, RaniaHamlaoui, Fatima ZahraBouri, Hadj2022-02-212022-02-212021http://hdl.handle.net/123456789/12843Metaphor has received increased attention from many researchers across a number of disciplines in recent years. In contrast to the previous studies which focused on the manual detection of metaphor in speech, this comparative study aims to investigate metaphor use among doctoral and master EFL learners using a semi-automatic method. Sixty master dissertation and twenty doctoral theses written by Algerian students, collected from different Universities websites were examined to measure the amount of metaphor production between males and females and to explore the extent to which learners make use of different types of metaphor. To achieve this goal, a corpus driven analysis was used, the procedure works by selecting a set of focus words in the corpus, searching for collocates sets then looking for the common and shared collocates by comparing the collocates sets of the focus word pairs. Words, which succeed to pass these selection steps, were concordanced and interpreted. The findings revealed that the density of metaphor increases from the master level to the doctoral as well as from males to females. The study exceeds its aims to reveal that the discussed concepts become bigger when moving from Master Dissertations to Doctoral Theses. Also, the terms used to produce Metaphors differ across males and females. This study can be of great importance in the sense that it raises educators’ awareness about the significant role of Metaphor as a powerful tool of conceptualization in learner’s academic writings.enmetaphorconceptualizationacademic writingsCorpusCollocatesOther