Contrast Analysis Between English And Chinese Figures Of Speech And Its Implications On ESL Reading

Through the teaching and testing result analysis on English majoring undergraduates and non-English majoring postgraduates, the author found that there would always be some troubles for Chinese students to taste the excellence and subtlety of original materials or understand the intention of the writer thoroughly and exactly. A lot of factors may have attributed to such phenomenon, such as students' English competence, reading methods and strategies. However, this thesis, from a different perspective demonstrated that different habits and preferences of rhetoric between English and Chinese must also be one of reasons. As the specific form of rhetoric, figures of speech appear everywhere, in sentences, paragraphs and texts. Thus, figures of speech play an important role in constructing meanings. Owing to the different background of language, culture and thought, there exist vast discrepancies on how to understand figures of speech between English and Chinese. Therefore, if students can master and deal with the difficulties and discrepancies adroitly, they might be able to catch the ideas and the writer's intention of English articles accurately. This thesis intended to explore the differences between English and Chinese figures of speech from the perspectives of language, culture and thought based on theories from cognitive linguistics, sociolinguistics, aesthetics and theories and principles of cross-cultural communication. The contrastive analysis demonstrated that there were great differences between English and Chinese figures of speech due to the diversities of geography, ethics, aesthetic preferences, thinking mode and class-consciousness. It is hoped that Chinese ESL instructors can help students foster the cross-cultural consciousness on rhetoric. Meanwhile, when students find it difficult to grasp main ideas or the author's purpose in ESL reading, they should begin with analyzing English articles from the differences between English and Chinese rhetoric and figures of speech. Besides, it is also hoped that this paper could make a contribution towards the study of contrastive rhetoric.