Transference & Foreign Language Teaching And Learning

In the 1970's, metaphor became a hot issue throughout the world. Since 1990's, metaphor has been a crucial topic in cognitive science. Over the past three decades, philosophers, psychologists and linguists have begun to agree that metaphor is not a mere figure of speech parasitic upon language, but is an indispensable basis of language and thought. What is more, the discussion of the metaphor issue is never complete without including the theory of grammatical metaphor.This thesis aims to indicate that grammatical metaphor, especially transference, can provide a brand-new perspective for foreign language teaching and learning since transferences in language learners actual use are the embodiment of their language learning achievement and language proficiency. The thesis elaborates the arguments in the following aspects:Firstly, researchers' understanding about metaphor has been deepening. The focus of study has shifted from lexical metaphor to grammatical metaphor since Halliday's introduction of grammatical metaphor theory in 1960's. On the one hand, grammatical metaphor is different from lexical metaphor in many respects. On the other hand, the theory of grammatical metaphor can complement the theory of metaphor in many aspects. Only the grammatical metaphor theory is included will the metaphor theory be completed.Secondly, the nature of grammatical metaphor will be discussed from the systemic functional point of view. Since three metafunctions simultaneously combine in one clause, grammatical metaphors are sensitive to these metafunctions, namely, ideational grammatical metaphor, interpersonal grammatical metaphor and textual grammatical metaphor. Under the systemic functional framework, grammatical metaphors are a step further along the delicacy scale. Logical and experiential grammatical metaphors are often combined when external conjunctive relations are realized metaphorically across transitivity structure and thiscombination is termed ideational grammatical metaphor. In interpersonal grammatical metaphor, metaphors of mood and modality can well combined in discourses and the two can take effect simultaneously. In the course of exchange between congruent realization and metaphorical realization transference plays an important role.Thirdly, transference will be chosen as the focus of study for the reason that transference is omnipresence of semantics at all levels of language use. Nominalization, adjectivization, verbalization and adverbalization are the major forms of metaphorical realizations of transference at the lexico-grammatical level. While at clause level, one process is often metaphorically realized by another process. They are deeply related to the actual language use. Abundant use of transferences may result in complexity and ambiguity in the discourses in discussion. At the same time, it is closely related to the readability of the discourse. Thus the denser realizations of transferences a discourse has, the more difficult it will be.Fourthly, a case study is designed to measure the relationship between transferences used by language learners and their language learning achievement. The subjects are 45 college students who are English majors, aged 19-22. They are required to write an about-200-word composition with the title "Effects of Technological Advance on Humankind" in 30 minutes. Transferences the students used are identified, selected and counted in their compositions. With the help of SPSS, the numbers of transferences they utilized are compared with their CET-4 scores correspondingly to see whether the two factors are related to each other. The result is definite that there exists a positive correlation between these two variables, though some limitations are inevitable. Another phenomenon should be mentioned that the numbers of transferences make up a small proportion in the subjects' writings. What can be inferred is that the subjects employ relatively few transferences in their writings and have little access to the productivity of theEnglish words by the addition of affixes. This is why the students feel at a loss in expressing themselves while writing compositions.Finally, implications for foreign language teaching are offered and a teaching plan is designed in order to display how to enhance transference implicitly and enlarge language learners' vocabulary by the addition of suffixes in a classroom environment.Doubtlessly, there are many controversies and problems in this thesis. Yet it will fulfill its mission, if only it can excite more original views upon developing transference in grammatical metaphor.