Metaphor Theory I Heard In The English Teaching

Metaphor has long been regarded as a figure of speech in language. However, George Lakoff and Mark Johnson contend that metaphor is also a cognitive phenomenon and the foundation of human's thought, language and behavior. The theory of cognitive metaphor makes it a possible approach to teach English through metaphors. Listening teaching and speaking teaching have always been the focal points but, in the meanwhile, the difficult points. Many students have the problem of understanding what they hear and express what they think exactly. One of the causes is just the lack of the metaphoric competence, which leads to the failure in target language thinking. In this paper, the writer talks about the relationship between metaphor and English teaching in listening and speaking from three aspects—phonetics, vocabulary and culture respectively, and set up two teaching experiments, in which metaphor is applied as a new teaching method. According to the statistics drawn from the experiments, the writer reaches the conclusion that English teachers can combine metaphor and listening and speaking teaching to make the students think in target language, and it will be an efficient approach to promote English listening and speaking teaching.