Research On Metaphor In College EFL Teachers’ In-class Language

Metaphor is pervasive in our daily life. Lakoff and Johnson successfully prove metaphor to be a necessity in everyday life in their famous works Metaphors We Live By. The study of metaphor might date back to more than2000years ago, and the traditional metaphor research has been confined to the field of rhetoric. According to contemporary theory of metaphor and cognitive linguistics, metaphor, as a kind of cognitive approach, not only shapes the way we think and act, but also promotes human language development. Metaphor was once defined by Lakoff and Johnson as a means of understanding and experiencing one kind of thing in terms of another. As it were, human cognition and language interrelate closely with each other, from which the present study benefits quite a lot. College EFL teachers’ language, as a major and vivid source of comprehensible language input, plays an incredible role during the process of second language acquisition. College EFL teachers, accordingly, might tend to account for the constant development of word meanings, possible semantic changes, along with interrelations between words and meanings by taking advantage of metaphorical expressions in the classroom settings. Metaphor in college EFL teachers’ language may largely facilitate students’ second language acquisition by promoting deeper involvement with the target language, stimulate their inspiration as well as imagination, foster their creativity, and further arouse their interest in second language acquisition. Thus, introducing metaphor into EFL teachers’ language is largely beneficial to foreign language education. Therefore, the present study of metaphor in EFL teachers’ language is of critical significance and obvious necessity.Based on the conceptual metaphor theory put forward by Lakoff and Johnson, who consider metaphorical concepts in terms of three types, structural metaphors, ontological metaphors and orientational metaphors, the present thesis mainly makes an exploratory study of the function of the three types of metaphor in the process of second language education, and attempts to apply the theory of conceptual metaphor to college EFL teachers’ language in the classroom environment. The research sets out to answer four questions as follows.Firstly, what is the metaphor density in total amount of college EFL teachers’ language within regular45-minute class time?Secondly, what are the differences of the metaphor densities among30college EFL teachers with different professional titles?Thirdly, what are the differences of the metaphor densities among30college EFL teachers with different genders?Fourthly, how are the three types of metaphors distributed in different dimensions of college EFL teachers’ language in the classroom setting?The research employs empirical study by analyzing metaphors adopted by thirty professors coming from different colleges and universities throughout China to clarify that the pervasiveness of metaphors in college EFL teachers’ language and the great significance metaphors bear in college EFL teachers’ language.