In a recent qualitative inquiry (Johnson, Heo, Reich, Leppisaari & Lee 2015) we investigated how South Korean and EU exchange students (the latter from Austria, Estonia and Finland) constructed and re-constructed their ‘global minds.’ In other words, we explored how the mobile students worked on their cultural and intercultural skills, knowledge, beliefs, and identities. The study provided insights on how the students resorted to shared and individual sense-making while using the potentials of the context, including social networks. The students also reflected on the educational systems and practices which they encountered. The students typically negotiated their identities when meeting friends and other people on campus as well as in the wider social arena. The students’ reflections about themselves as global persons and future teachers were also articulated. (Johnson et al. 2015.)

In the present case study, I wish to carry on with the effort of understanding intercultural communication and learning in situ, with a focus on authentic interview data. I attempt to accomplish this with the help of narrative and metaphor analysis of exchange students’ interviews. My research is driven by an interest of contributing to narrative discourse inquiry. I also hope that the study will benefit globalised higher education, as it will bring insights about these students’ ways of understanding and conceptualising their experience.
As a narrative researcher, I am interested both in narrative content and form (Lieblich, Tuval-Mashiach & Zilber 1998, 12-18; Clandinin & Connelly 2000, 162-168). Content is identified as the ‘facts’ displayed in the research participants’ narrative account (answers to the question 'what?'). Conversely, ‘form’ stands for the performative and negotiated construal of the individual account (answers to the question 'how?').

We have no direct access to human experience and reality. But symbols, metaphor, narrative and language/discourse constitute a way of making sense of them and investigating them. Connelly and Clandinin (2006) stated that ‘story… is a portal through which a person enters the world and by which their experience of the world is interpreted and made personally meaningful’. Yet equally, as Lakoff and Johnson (2003/1980) put it, we live by metaphors (and metonymies), and we resort to them for ‘understanding and experiencing one kind of a thing in terms of another’ (Lakoff & Johnson 2003/1980, 5). As a narrative researcher, I follow these definitions.

The spoken discourse displays metaphor and metonymy in different ways (Cameron 2003; 2008; 2012). Depending on the topic and purpose of interaction, there is both variation and regularity in the use of metaphor and metonymy, at the local level of talk (Cameron 2008a; 2008b; 2012; Kövecses 2002, 215-228). Systematicity of metaphor/ metonymy use, across the interview data, is equally worth investigating. The ones that are conventionalised over the speech community are called conceptual metaphors/metonymies (Cameron 2008b; Kövecses 2002, 108-109).

The research questions of my study are: How are the students’ study abroad and intercultural experience narrated in the interviews? Secondly, what metaphors and metonymies are used when narrating study abroad and intercultural experience? Thirdly, how are these metaphors and metonymies used across the interview data?

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