abstract following innovations in the field of elt, a new topic which has recently attracted a lot of attention is metaphor analysis. although this area of research is still in its infancy in elt, it seems that the idea can shed more light on the puzzle of english language learning and teaching. therefore, the major aim of this study is to analyze language learning and teaching in formal and informal contexts of education in iran, employing metaphor analysis. to this end, the researcher has conducted the study in two phases: qualitative and quantitative. to conduct the qualitative research, some teachers and students in schools and institutes were asked to produce as many metaphors as possible about teaching and learning in the current and ideal situations. to do the quantitative research, the researcher based on the guidelines laid down by the scholars in the field, designed a checklist and asked the teachers and learners to select the metaphors which fit their current and ideal situations of teaching and learning at schools and language institutes. the results of both phases of the study demonstrated the school teachers persistence on teaching and viewing learners based on the major premises of behaviourism; while the school learners preferred to take part in classes which follow the rules of cognitivism, the same rules that language institute teachers and learners believed are run in their classes. therefore, it was found that institute teachers and learners who live in the cognitive era now wish to move towards the situative perspective of education which promotes them one step ahead of school teachers and learners. finally, the results were discussed in the context of language education in iran and some implications and suggestions were presented. key terms: cognitive linguistics, conceptual metaphor, linguistic metaphor, metaphor analysis this document was created with win2pdf available at http://www.daneprairie.com. the unregistered version of win2pdf is for evaluation or non-commercial use only.