Chinese College EFL Learners' Acquisition Of English Metaphorical Idioms From Cognitive Semantics

English metaphorical idioms are usually incredibly difficult for English learners to acquire because they are stored in long-term memory and specified with regard to their semantic and syntactic structures as well as their pragmatic applicability.With the rise and development of cognitive linguistics,especially cognitive semantics,idiom studies have begun to study idioms with cognitive linguistic approaches,particularly conceptual metaphor theory.However,studies investigating EFL learners' acquisition of English idioms under the framework of conceptual metaphor only account for a small proportion,and empirical studies on Chinese college EFL learners are even fewer.It is a research topic worth more attention and exploration.Thus,this paper tries to study whether the background information of English metaphorical idioms plays an influential part in the process of language internalization through a series of empirical studies and interviews.It also tries to propose some strategies and suggestions on acquiring metaphorical idioms by contrasting test results from different target groups.The study focuses on three research questions:1)How does the background knowledge of English metaphorical idioms contribute to the acquisition of these idioms by Chinese college EFL learners?2)How does the English proficiency affect the acquisition of English metaphorical idioms by Chinese college EFL learners?3)What is the relation between the acquisition of metaphorical idioms and learners' cognitive differences?This study is conducted based on theories of cognitive semantics.The theoretical framework is based on three important theories,which are Lakoff and Johnson's(1980)conceptual metaphor theory,image schema theory and mental image theory.The study involves 120 college EFL learners from two universities of Hainan.All the participants have not been learning English in an all English speaking environment.Two tests are given to the participants with 4 weeks' interval.Each test has designed from 7 idioms which originated from Greek mythology.Two types of related materials are designed to help the participants learn the meanings of the idioms,with Material One providing the participants with bilingual meanings and word-in-use examples and Material Two the meanings of the idioms,the examples and their background stories.After the tests are completed,all scores of the tests are processed and scores of different groups are compared both horizontally and vertically with computing by SPSS 18.This study has provided some evidence to indicate the positive influences of background knowledge on learning English metaphorical idioms and effective impacts of the prior knowledge on understanding the meaning and usage of the idioms.The results also suggest that learning idioms or phrases with a story-like background information,which stimulates the learners to memorize with mental images,is more effective than learning with translation or explanation alone.Furthermore,it is better to put the learning of idioms after building up a certain amount of vocabulary and learning basic sentences patterns and grammar knowledge in order to acquire idioms with more efficiency and accuracy.These findings come to the conclusion that the metaphorical idiom acquisition need to take into account the etymological introduction,EFL learners proficiency level and cultural influences.These factors may interact with each other to impact the learners' language acceptability,learning interests and comprehension ability.The study shows that advanced learners are able to make better use of the English knowledge as well as their encyclopedia knowledge in working out the meaning of idioms even though they have no information input.This suggests that English idioms should be introduced to EFL learners after they have certain foundation in English language and culture.