A Metaphorical Approach To Culture Teaching

Traditionally, metaphor is viewed as a kind of figure of speech, which has beenstudied for more than two thousand years. However, in cognitive linguistics, metaphoris regarded as the source of human thought, an instrument that human beings use tocognize, to think and act as well as to develop their language. This paper first gives areview of related studies including studies of metaphors, culture-based studies onmetaphors and studies of metaphors in language and culture teaching. These researchesfind that metaphor has a closely relationship with culture and it can shed light on culturelearning. Therefore, it is worth to considering whether conceptual metaphor canpromote the present culture teaching, and can improve the ability of students to useforeign language reasonably in the real cultural language environment. According to theuniversality and cultural variation in metaphor, the author analyzes the similarities anddiversities of emotional conceptual metaphors in Chinese and English, which furtherreveal the link between metaphor and culture. The similarity and diversity in metaphorscan deepen students’ understanding of the target culture and arouse their desire to learndifferent thinking mode of the target culture so that they can acquaint themselves withthe influence of cultural factors on language learning.Based on the cognitive theory of metaphor, the research attempts to testify that themetaphorical approach to culture teaching is feasible and valid. Then, an empiricalstudy is organized lasting for two months in Chong Qing Normal University. Thesubjects are selected from the college sophomore students of non-English majors. Inexperimental stage, the teacher in the experimental class attempts to teach cultureknowledge by the means of metaphor. In controlled class, the teacher still takes sometraditional methods to teach cultural knowledge without concerning any metaphortheory. The experimental data is collected by the means of tests and questionnaires.According to the data analysis of the empirical study, the results of the pre-testindicated that the two groups are almost equally incompetence in their mastery of cultural concepts. However, the results in the post-test revealed that the experimentalclass taught with conceptual metaphor theory has extremely better than the controlledclass. These findings suggest that the new approach is efficient to promote the presentculture teaching. At the same time, the data from questionnaires also suggest thatstudents take more interest and get themselves involved actively in the process ofculture teaching through the method. In the end of the paper, the author hopes that theapproach can be integrated with the traditional culture teaching methods to contributepositively to the present culture teaching rather than consider the approach as asubstitute for the traditional culture teaching methods.