The Role Of Cognitive Metaphor In Enhancing Learners' English Vocabulary Acquisition: An Empirical Study

This thesis exams conceptual metaphor and explores its possible application into vocabulary teaching. Conceptual metaphor, put forward by Lakoff & Johnson, is the systematic cognitive model or metaphorical process of thinking which lies behind daily language and structures our conceptual system. According to Lakoff & Johnson, the essence of metaphor is to understand or experience one thing in terms of another. Therefore, there will be a possibility that the application of metaphor in vocabulary teaching to help students to handle metaphorical expressions successfully.This thesis consists of six parts. After a brief introduction in the first part, the researcher gives a theoretical overview of the Conceptual Metaphor Theory including the main features of metaphor, the philosophical bases, the working mechanism, the classification, the criticism and limitations.Based on the situation in China, Chapter 3 introduces the research methodology.The subjects involved in this study were 60 second-year non-English majors from 2 natural classes in Hanshan Normal University. According to their Pre-test scores, there was no significant difference between the experiment group and the control group. During the treatment, the researcher took post-test and final-test respectively to evaluate their development and compare their difference in vocabulary level and metaphorical competence.Chapter 4 and Chapter 5 are about the empirical study on Chinese college students' vocabulary level and metaphorical competence. Based on the results of the quantitative and qualitative studies, the major findings could be summarized as:1) If the students are taught the lexical module including word's literal and metaphorical meaning, they can understand and learn the words better and handle them for a longer time.2) The students improved the metaphorical competence through the acquisition of these lexical modules to some extent. The modules help students set up the relationship among different meanings and usages of new words so that they could understand the derived meaning better.3) The metaphorical concepts which include the lexical modules play a positive role in L2 teaching and learning. They help L2 learners understand the target language better through deduction. In other words, metaphorical concepts assist learners in association and help them to identify and interpret integrated metaphorical linguistic expressions more effectively. They allow learners to understand one thing in terms of another, building a bridge between the items of known and unknown, tangible and intangible, familiar and unfamiliar.The final part draws out the conclusion and discusses the possible implications of this study for L2 teaching and learning. The thesis will end up by pointing out the limitations of this research and some recommendations for future researches.To sum up, teaching English vocabulary through metaphor is a promising virgin land in China, which might become the trend of applied linguistics in the near future. Relevant parties should devote enough attention into this area.