An Empirical Study On The Application Of Conceptual Metaphor Theory To Senior High School English Vocabulary Teaching

Vocabulary is the foundation of language learning and it plays a significant role in senior high school English learning.However,the traditional vocabulary teaching method only pays attention to the spelling and the literal meanings of vocabulary but does not focus on the origin of the meanings and the relationship between meanings,thus it is very inefficient.Mechanical memory retention is very short,so although students spend a lot of time and energy,their vocabulary mastery is not ideal,which leads to a decline in students’ confidence and motivation in English learning.In order to improve students’ vocabulary learning efficiency and the ability to use vocabulary,experts and scholars have conducted a lot of explorations and researches.Since the 1980 s,a large number of theoretical and practical studies on the application of cognitive linguistic theory to pedagogy have emerged in China.On this basis,this paper applies the conceptual metaphor theory to English vocabulary learning in senior high schools in order to improve the learning efficiency.This paper intends to solve the following research questions: Is it effective to improve students’ vocabulary acquisition by applying conceptual metaphor theory to senior high school vocabulary teaching? How to present the vocabulary like polysemy,phrasal verb and idiom based on conceptual metaphor theory?This thesis conducted an empirical study in two parallel classes for a period of four months.During the experimental study,the traditional teaching method was used in the controlled class,while the conceptual metaphor theory instruction vocabulary teaching method was adopted in the experimental class.Before the experiment,students in both classes were asked to complete a questionnaire and a pre-test,and after the experiment they were required to complete a post-test.All the collected data were analyzed by SPSS21.0 to prove the effectiveness of the lexical teaching method guided by conceptual metaphor theory.The study found that: the conceptual metaphor theory instructed vocabulary teaching method can help senior school students to improve their vocabulary acquisition.Compared with the traditional method of vocabulary learning,studentscan better master the use of polysemy,idioms and phrases by applying this new method to the real classroom teaching.Moreover,the conceptual metaphor instructed method is not only beneficial to vocabulary learning,but also helpful to increase students’ interest in English learning and metaphoric competence.In conclusion,it is efficient to apply conceptual metaphor theory to senior high school vocabulary teaching and it is feasible to everyday classroom teaching as well.