Metaphors have been assigned a central role in our perceptual and cognitive processes. Gradol and Swann (1988) identified conflicting discourses in the English language education debate. The article studies those discourses as structured by metaphors, which will serve to identify the unifying ideological tendency that otherwise may escape attention of more traditional paradigms of linguistic analysis. Although the language used in the educational debate on the teaching of English in the United Kingdom should be clear, rational, objective and non metaphorical, the article shows that many key terms are themselves metaphorical labels. This has been demonstrated thanks to the analysis of two metaphorical labels (Standard and English) in the debates on English language education and contrasted in the context of an opposition between generative conduit and negotiative metalinguistic metaphors. (Begoña Casasnovas Gil, Ruiz de Mendoza Group)