A Study Of Application Of Conceptual Metaphor To CET

It is generally understood that metaphor is one of rhetoric devices, a special means of language expression. From the 1970s on, some philosophers, sociologists, in America and Europe began to approach it from a new perspective. In 1980, American linguist Lakoff, and British philosopher Johnson initiated the cognitive approach to the study metaphor in their remarkable work Metaphor We Live. They pointed out that metaphor is far more than a rhetorical device; rather it is fundamental structure of our thought and action (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980:3). In their opinion, conceptual metaphor, the key concept of their book, governs our thought and action, and serves as a cognitive instrument, which provides us motivations for language teaching.But in College English Teaching(CET), metaphor is still treated as merely a rhetorical device for the purpose of appreciation or completely ignored, and in the traditional college English syllabus and the college Curriculum Requirement, metaphor is not explicitly required as well. As a result, students have a lower understanding of metaphoric language than congruent language(董宏乐, 2002). The abundant metaphoric language in the teaching materials has composed a great obstacle to develop students' competence, As for such current situation of college English Teaching, the author is firmly convinced of the significance to utilize it in CET. By the means of elaborating this theory and conducting experiments, this paper is aimed at introducing strategies on how to promote students' ability of understanding metaphoric language, and furthermore, verifies their feasibility and superiorities.The paper falls into five parts. Chapter 1 is the introduction, in which the author analyses the present situation of College English Teaching, presents some problems of it, and proposes the inevitability of introducing conceptual metaphor into CET. Chapter 2 gives a historical review of the development of metaphor. In chapter 3, the author proposes the methods and strategies on how to promote students' ability of understanding metaphorical expressions. In Chapter 4, the writer tries to prove that the new method is better than the traditional one by conducting an experiment. By comparing the scores and performance of students of the controlled group with those of the uncontrolled group in a test, we may tentatively arrive at a conclusion that this strategy is an efficient approach of CET, of which the result of t-value is supportive.However, there is never and will never be a perfect method teaching, and the author believes that the new methods in question are far from being perfect.