| Since the rise of cognitive linguistics in the 1970 s,the understanding of metaphor in academia has gradually switched from traditional rhetoric view to a way of thinking.Metaphor-related studies have been intensively discussed in various fields of cognitive research,for example,metaphor in SLA.Quite a few scholars hold that the importance of metaphorical competence is equivalent to that of communicative competence and linguistic competence in language teaching,calling them "three in one" teaching philosophy for language.The existing metaphorical study focuses more on theoretical study,in which the importance of metaphor competence has been gradually confirmed.Empirical correlation study and specific strategy study are relatively lacking.There is even no metaphor competence study on English-major postgraduates before.Thus,this study is of great academic value and is significant in practical teaching.The purpose of this study is to explore the correlation between English-major postgraduates' four aspects of metaphor competence and their comprehension ability,based on which strategies for metaphoric competence improvement are proposed.Three research questions are answered in the study: 1)what is the general level of the four kinds of metaphoric competence of Chinese English-major postgraduates? 2)What is the correlation between four aspects of metaphoric competence and two aspects of language comprehension(reading comprehension and listening comprehension)? 3)Based on the results of the study,what can we do to improve English-major postgraduates' MC? In order to answer the three research questions,the researcher hands out questionnaires to 54 English-major postgraduates from a university in Yunnan Province.At the same time,semi-open interview is also conducted.The questionnaire used in this study is adjusted on the version of Dr.Littlemore's according to practical needs.After that,questionnaire is collected with the help of the online platform SOJUMP and later data analysis is made by SPSS17.0.Through statistical analysis on the results of qualitative research(interview)and quantitative research(questionnaire),several main points have been found: 1)the overall MC of Chinese English-major postgraduates is at a relatively low level,which reflects there is enough improving potential.2)There is less correlation between listening comprehension and MC,while correlation between reading comprehension and MC is significant,especially the ability to finding meaning in metaphor and the fluency of metaphor interpretation are significantly correlated with reading comprehension.3)There is no authoritative textbook for MC training and no due attention has been pays to MC from teachers and students.Even in language teaching syllabus,there is no requirement for MC training.4)Students have no complete understanding of metaphor and most of their views are limited to rhetorical level.They would not initially use metaphor if not required.Findings and deficiencies of this empirical study have given some implications for study in the future and the cultivation of MC in teaching: 1)the teachers and students should switch their views towards metaphor and high emphasis and attention are needed for metaphor.2)High-quality teaching material aiming at MC training,and specific syllabus emphasizing MC training is critical.3)Teachers should actively strengthen their metaphorical quality,and enhance research on students' metaphoric competence.4)In teaching methods,teachers are supposed to try applying metaphorical words teaching and grammatical metaphor teaching to practical teaching process.5)In teaching strategy,teachers should constantly summarize the cohesive function of metaphor in discourse,lead them to learn cultural metaphor and help students to accumulate more metaphorical expression in real situation by using corpus.Multiple aspects should be considered to train their MC in order to improve their reading comprehension and integrated language competence. |
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