Grammatical Metaphor And Its Influence On EFL Reading Comprehension

Grammatical metaphor was initially introduced by M.A.K. Halliday in his book An Introduction to Functional Grammar(1985), which marked the beginning of the theoretical study on GM. Grammatical metaphor not only exists in scientific discourse but also exists in ordinary written discourse.Reading can be thought of as a way to draw information from a text and to form an interpretation of that information. (Grabe and Stoller, 2006:4 ) Reading is an area that attracts attention from many scholars. In College English learning, EFL learners always find some areas beyond them in reading comprehension. Grammatical metaphor constitutes one of the difficulties in reading comprehension for EFL learners.This thesis explores the comprehension of grammatical metaphor in EFL reading and the application of grammatical metaphor theory to EFL reading in China. It aims at testifying the influence of grammatical metaphor on EFL students' reading comprehension, and help students to improve the competence of grammatical metaphor in reading comprehension. The research proves cultivation of the competence of grammatical metaphor, improves students reading comprehension.This thesis falls into 5 chapters. Chapter 1 is the introductory part, Chapter 2 briefly reviews the development of grammatical metaphor theory, Chapter 3 discusses the features of grammatical metaphor and reading comprehension, Chapter 4 provides an empirical study on the basis of applying grammatical metaphor to EFL reading. Chapter 5 offers a summary of the whole thesis, tentative conclusions, limitations and suggested topics for future researches.