Application Of Conceptual Metaphor To English Vocabulary Teaching In Vocational Colleges

Vocabulary, the main element in language, is a unity of structure and meaning in language system.As an inseparable component of language, vocabulary has always been an important issue for centuries. However, vocabulary teaching has been undervalued in the field of the second language acquisition for a long time and linguistics laid more emphasis on grammar and phonology rather than vocabulary under the influence of structuralism. It was not until the 1970s that vocabulary teaching gained its recognition in the domain of linguistic studies.In China, not only teachers but also students have realized the importance of vocabulary teaching and learning in language study. However, both of them devote a significant amount of time and energy to vocabulary teaching and learning with little success because of lack of proper teaching method and learning strategies. The traditional vocabulary teaching methods mainly focus on the teaching of surface vocabulary knowledge such as spelling, pronunciation and acceptations. They fail to solve the problem how to comprehend vocabulary from the cognitive angle. So how to teach vocabulary efficiently is undoubtedly a very urgent problem. This thesis attempts to find an effective method by means of applying conceptual metaphor to English vocabulary teaching in vocational colleges.The study of metaphor dates back more than 2000 years, to ancient times. The traditional view of metaphor regarded it as a deviant and decorative rhetoric device at the lexical level. With the development of cognitive linguistic, there is a growing awareness that metaphor is not only a universal language phenomenon, but also a model of thinking, a cognitive tool that is indispensable. As a model of thinking, metaphor exists everywhere in people's thinking and language performance, its features, cross-domain mapping and cognitive mechanism also provide a new visual angle for language teaching.At present, there are many studies on the combination of conceptual metaphor and vocabulary teaching in university English teaching, but there are seldom empirical studies on vocabulary teaching based on conceptual metaphor, especially in vocational English teaching. That is the reason why the author intends to carry out an empirical study on applying conceptual metaphor to vocabulary teaching in a vocational college.The empirical study was conducted at Loudi Vocational and Technical College for 10 weeks. The subjects were 80 freshmen from Computer Software Engineering Department. They were divided into two classes randomly according to their college entrance exam achievements, 40 students in each class. Class 1 was the control class and Class 2 was the experimental class. The subjects were required to have a pre-test about their vocabulary level in the first week in the experiment. Then in the experimental class the author tried to teach English polysemy, idioms and cultural implications under conceptual metaphor by introducing its philosophical foundation, working mechanism, basic characteristics and classifications. A post test was carried out to verify whether application of conceptual metaphor was beneficial to vocabulary teaching.Based on the data collected from the experiment, independent Samples T-Tests were conducted by utilizing spss13.0. From the results of the experiment we may conclude that students can develop their metaphorical and cultural awareness; enlarge their vocabulary with the help of conceptual metaphor. With a good mastery of conceptual metaphor, the students are able to understand and memorize English vocabulary better. The findings of this study indicate that it is possible for the teachers to facilitate students'vocabulary learning with the help of conceptual metaphor in classroom.Finally, the author gives some suggestions on how to employ conceptual metaphor more effectively in vocabulary teaching. Hopefully this thesis will be of some practical help for our English teaching and contribute to the further study in this field.