Design And Application Of English Phrasal Verb Teaching In Senior High School Based On Cognitive Metaphor Theory

English phrasal verbs have become one of the most challenging contents in Chinese senior high school English learning because of their extensive semantics and structure.Many scholars at home and abroad have done a lot of research in structure and semantics to improve the accuracy of phrasal verbs.Different from the syntactic and semantic studies of phrasal verbs,the cognitive metaphor theory in cognitive linguistics provides people with a different perspective.This study explains phrasal verbs from the cognitive metaphor theory in cognitive linguistics.Based on the conceptual metaphor theory proposed by Lakoff and Johnson,this study attempts to explore students’ understanding,output and interest in this method in English phrasal verbs,and puts forward three research questions:(1)Can the teaching based on conceptual metaphor theory better promote senior high school students’ understanding of target phrasal verbs?(2)Can the teaching based on cognitive metaphor theory better promote the production of target phrasal verbs by high school students?(3)Can the teaching of phrasal verbs in senior high school English based on cognitive metaphor stimulate senior high school students’ interest in learning phrasal verbs? The100 participants in this study were from two classes in a high school in Yan’an.They were divided into experimental group and control group.Under the guidance of the same teacher,they used two different phrasal verb teaching methods.One is to use cognitive metaphor theory to teach phrasal verbs in the control group,while the other is to use cognitive metaphor theory to teach phrasal verbs in the experimental group.The instruments involved in the teaching experiment include phrasal verb test paper,questionnaire,observation scale and interview outline.Finally,the data are analyzed by SPSS and the collected data are discussed.The conclusions are as follows:(1)the teaching of English phrasal verbs based on conceptual metaphor theory can greatly promote the understanding of phrasal verbs of senior high school students.Learners can memorize and retrieve target phrase verbs more skillfully through the metaphorical meaning of sketch words.(2)Compared with traditional teaching,phrasal verb teaching based on conceptual metaphor theory can promote the output of phrasal verbs for senior high school students.With the help of the knowledge generated by conceptual metaphor theory,learners can more skillfully use target phrasal verbs in oral and written contexts.(3)According to the interview and observation results,teaching based on conceptual metaphor theory helps students establish an organized system to learn phrasal verbs,which can be easier and more effective.Once students find that learning phrasal verbs can be organized systematically,their interest will undoubtedly increase.In a word,it is very important to cultivate students’ metaphorical awareness,which can help learners deeply understand the language.Students can understand the metaphorical meaning of each different sketch word.They no longer need to remember the corresponding Chinese meaning when they see phrasal verbs,to make their memory more profound.