A Study Of The Development Of Metaphorical Discourse Competence Under Complex Dynamic Theory

Metaphorical competence has become a focal topic in the sphere of applied linguistic researches of metaphor theory and an interdisciplinary study of cognitive linguistics and foreign language teaching.The literature shows that majority of current studies concentrate on the definitions and causes of metaphorical competence and teaching methods.What’s more,most studies tend to adopt the psycholinguistic research methods such as semantic priming while few studies are conducted on the discourse level with oral or written production as the target.This study,by referring to complex dynamic theory,holds the view that students’ development of metaphorical discourse competence is a complex dynamic theory and tentatively probes into its developmental characteristics.Metaphor density,conceptual domain types and discourse patterns are set as three core dimensions to observe and explore.The study randomly selects a group of second-year English majors(the class size being 30)as subjects and dynamically analyzes their writing discourses for consecutively 8 times(across 16 weeks)and finds out the properties of systematicity,variability and emergence concerning the aforementioned three dimensions.Along with the experimental study and discourse analysis,a questionnaire survey is also supplemented to investigate the potential contributory factors that take effect on the students’ development of metaphorical discourse competence,namely,explicit instruction,topic variance,knowledge and experience,etc.This study aims to provide an empirical case study for the researches of metaphorical competence on the level of discourse production,and offer a new insight and a new approach for studies of literacy and teaching of writing.