Although teaching of Turkish as a foreign language stands out as a remarkable discipline, there is no undergraduate level curriculum in this field in higher education institutions. With the theoretical or applied courses given at the postgraduate education levels, the gaps in training instructors or theoreticians are tried to be closed. However, in many academic evaluations or definitions of professional competence, there is a request for documents or certificates related to the teaching process that is the subject of the study. Participants who have competencies from different disciplines are also interested in this field and have an awareness about teaching Turkish to foreigners and want to contribute to their personal development. In fact, these certificate documents are accepted as one of the qualification steps of domestic or international professional assignments. It is observed that the participation in the "Certificate Programs on the Teaching of Turkish as a Foreign Language" organized by universities or various course centres to meet these needs of the relevant provinces is increasing day by day. In this context, participants who have a certificate of teaching Turkish as a foreign language are expected to think about this certificate program as a whole and to explain the program subject to the study based on their metaphorical perceptions in a reasoned way or to explain it using metaphors. In this study, by applying the phenomenology design, which is one of the qualitative research approaches, in the 2021-2022 Spring and 2022-2023 Fall academic terms, the study group consisting of 120 trainees who received certificates within the scope of "Teaching Turkish as a Foreign Language Certificate Program" organized by AYBU DİLMER has been requested to answer the question “Teaching Turkish as a Foreign Language (teaching) Certificate Program is like ………………………….. for me. Because …………………………………." with the help of an interview form, which is a semi-structured data collection tool. The data obtained from the participants were analysed based on categories by content analysis method. After the frequency range and percentile given in the first step, which includes 67 different metaphors, the contents of the metaphors in the "Job Opportunity, Personal Development, Job Acquisition and Out of Classification" categories have been shown with sample sentences.

Teaching Turkish as a foreign language, certificate program, metaphor