An Experimental Study On Metaphorical Competence Of English Majors

In recent years, with the development of cognitive linguistics, the metaphor research from cognitive angle is causing more and more scholars’attention. Especially, the latest achievements of conceptual metaphor theory have convincingly proved metaphor’s core status and universality in language. Metaphor is not only a linguistic phenomenon, but also a kind of cognitive means and ways of thinking. The cultivation of metaphorical competence must also be an indispensable part of the second language teaching.However, a large number of researches both at home and abroad show that, because of the limited metaphorical competence, even if the foreign language learners can achieve very high verbal fluency and can be impeccable from the form and communicative aspects, but they can not make it to be so natural. In view of this foreign language learning phenomenon mentioned above, guided by the conceptual metaphor theories, this research takes the English-majored students in Foreign Language Department of Northwest A&F University as the subjects and applies the metaphor theory to the second language acquisition teaching procedures comprehensively, such as vocabulary, culture, and writing to encourage the subjects to use the metaphor thinking and cultivate subjects’metaphorical competence in the experimental teaching. The training effect is examined through metaphorical competence test.The metaphorical competence test aims at examine the change of competence in finding, interpreting, understanding and creating metaphors before and after the metaphorical teaching. The collected data is computed and analyzed by SPSS18.0. With the combination of the interview, the results are as follows:1. Before the teaching experiment is carried out, most students do not have metaphorical awareness and do not use the metaphorical thinking ways in learning. The subjects’ metaphorical competence is low.2. After the implementation of metaphorical teaching, metaphorical competence of the subjects has been significantly improved as a whole, especially the competence in finding metaphors, interpreting metaphors and understanding metaphors. However, the competence in creating metaphors has little change.3. Influenced by the conflicts of Chinese and English conceptual system, the factors which constrain the development of second language learners’ metaphorical competence mainly include the conceptual negative transfer, mode of thinking and cultural differences.These findings mentioned above may provide useful inspiration and suggestions on foreign language teaching and second language acquisition.1. The fundamental reason why the foreign language learners can not achieve the fluency of native speakers lies in the lack of metaphorical consciousness. It is feasible and necessary to cultivate metaphorical competence in second language teaching.2. The cultivation of metaphorical competence is long-term and all-round. Therefore, teachers should actively guide the students to compare the highlighted cultural, social, historical and ethnic differences between the mother tongue and the target language in the use of metaphor. The teachers should also encourage the students to learn the mechanism of metaphor in the target language and learn the ways of thinking from native language speakers.3. The cultivation of metaphorical competence does not mean the neglection and demeaning of language competence and communicative competence. On the contrary, it aims at drawing attention to metaphor in foreign language teaching, because metaphorical competence can have a significant effect on the master of language competence and communicative competence.