A Study Of The Relation Between Metaphor Awareness And College English Vocabulary

Since the publication of Lakoff and Johnson's Metaphors We Live by in 1980, metaphor study has been arousing scholars' interests both home and abroad, mainly from a perspective of cognitive linguistics. In resent years, some researchers began to pay attention to metaphor study in applied linguistics which are both in the broader sense, i.e., metaphor in practical use; and in the narrower sense, i.e. metaphor in language teaching study. Compared with metaphor study abroad, metaphor study home is relatively week, beginning in early 1990s with the focus mainly on cognitive linguistics field. In recent years, metaphor study in applied linguistics also began to attract attention at home, some scholars point out that metaphor study in applied linguistics is one of the future directions of metaphor study, and the application of metaphor in foreign language teaching, especially in vocabulary teaching, is an important future study field. We can , however, find few studies in this field.According to cognitive semantics, metaphor is an important process in extending words' meanings. The study, through experiments, explores effective activities to improve Chinese EFL vocabulary teaching by means of metaphor theory, aiming to provide some valuable reference data to the improvement of vocabulary teaching. The theory basis mainly includes three aspects: The study model and achievements in Boers' study of improving vocabulary teaching by utilizing metaphor theory; the processing level/depth theory proposed by Craik and Lockhart; Visser's theory that the teaching of metaphorically extended meanings of a new word can enhance deep processing.The present study is based on Boers' study model, but also has important differences: 1) Boers' study was conducted in class time, aiming to investigate the impact of the experimental approaches on the retention of the expressions which had just been learned, while the experiment in the present study lasted for 8 weeks, aiming to investigate the impact of teaching approaches which intend to cultivate metaphor awareness on learners' vocabulary metaphorically extension abilities. 2) The subjects' cultural backgrounds are different, which helps to take an insight into the influence of cross-linguistic and cross-cultural differences on the process of extending metaphorical meanings.The independent and dependent variables are metaphor awareness enhancing teaching approaches and vocabulary acquisition respectively. The operational definition of the independent variable is different vocabulary teaching approaches adopted in the EC and the CC. In the EC, teaching approach aiming to help subjects realize metaphor themes behind metaphorical expressions is adopted, while in the CC, with other teaching methods the same as those in the EC, there is no metaphor awareness raising activities. The dependent variable is reflected in the posttest scores. The experimental material has three resources: 1) experimental material used in Boers' and Clandfield's studies; 2) Cobuild Corpus 7: Metaphor by Alice Deignan; 3) Metaphor Dictionary. The subjects in the study are two parrallel classes who major in computer sciences. Before the experiment, the two classes took the pretests, which included 24 metaphorical polysemes. Pretest 1 focused on the subjects' mastery of the 24 metaphorical polysemes' literal meanings, Pretest 2 the metaphorical meanings. Through the pretests, it was concluded that there were no statistical significant differences between the two classes before the experiment, and the experimental material was selected, i.e., the 8 metaphorical expressions which the lowest correct rate in Pretest 2 were selected as the experimental materials. After the pretests, the two classes took an 8-week experiment exercise in which tens of linguistic metaphorical expressions reflecting 8 conceptual metaphors were taught to the subjects. After the treatment, the two classes took the posttests which fell into 4 parts: Posttest 1 which included 24 items tested metaphorical expressions which had been learned in the exercises; Po...