An Experimental Study On Developing College Students’ Conceptual Fluency By Cultivation Of Metaphorical Competence

In the1990s, linguist Danesi (1995) proposed the theory of conceptual fluency, that“the ability to interrelate the underlying structure of concepts to the surface grammar andvocabulary that reflects them”(Danesi，2000：42). As the concept of human being ismetaphorical in nature, the essence of language is also metaphorical. The meaning ofgrasping the conceptual fluency of the target language means the learners could uselanguage to conduct consideration and express concepts with the metaphorical deductivemethod. Therefore, linguistic educationalists begin to set conceptual fluency as the finaltarget of language teaching, they believe that metaphorical competence teaching is able toconstruct conceptual fluency and enhance the nativeness and appropriateness of theirforeign language expressions.Nowadays, there are a lot of English learners to express the cultural concepts of thetarget language in terms of the vocabularies and grammars of their native language.Although there are few grammar mistakes, vocabulary mistakes or pronunciation mistakesin their speech, they still use the conceptual system of their mother language, resulted anon-idiomatic usage. This phenomenon tells us that, most of colleges and universities inour country have been applying the traditional teaching mode without the deservedattention to metaphor, which caused the low metaphorical competence of the students. Asa result, the students cannot reach the conceptual fluency and troubled their foreignlanguage learning. Therefore, at present or even for a long run, how to improve students’conceptual fluency is the problem deserves our grate attention.Based on all of these former theories, this thesis discussed how to cultivate students’metaphorical awareness to develop their conceptualize competence and how to enhancelearners’ conceptual fluency to facilitate their idiomatic and pragmatic competence. At themeantime, it explored the approach to make use of the theory of conceptual fluency fromcultural linguistics to design curriculum, classroom activities, procedures and assessmentmethods. At last, analyzed the relationship between radical metaphor and derivedmetaphor through the classroom activities, compared the conceptual system of nativelanguage and target language to effectively arouse students’ conceptual awareness and explored the classroom activity design on cultivate the conceptualization competence.The experimental research chose two intact classes from the English department ofChaoyang Teachers College as the control group and the experimental group for one term.Each of the two classes has33students. And all the students in the two classes are in theirsecond year on the campus and they all share the similar English proficiency. Theexperimental group accepted some extra metaphorical teaching in addition to the sametraditional teaching process shared together with the control group. Besides this, on thebasis of the metaphorical theories and the metaphorical test offered by the domestic andexotic experts, the author collected much more related material, designed some test paperswhich fit for the subjects as the pretest and posttest. Moreover, the experimental result isanalyzed by SPSS.The result of the experiment demonstrated that the systematical metaphor teachingcould greatly enhance the study interests of the second language learner, and effectivelyimproved their conceptualize competence and communicative competence. Through theanalyzing of radical metaphor, the comparison between the native language and targetlanguage are able to effectively arouse students’ conceptual awareness. However, thecultivation of conceptual fluency need more time systematical teaching and training.Through the induction of the derived metaphors, revision of the radical metaphors,comparison of the conceptual differences between the native language and target languageand the conceptual error analysis, the thesis explored a new curriculum design approachon cultivation the metaphorical competence and conceptual fluency of the secondlanguage learners, which may be helpful for the college English teaching reformation.