Towards A Metaphorical Foreign Language Teaching

It is a long history of foreign language teaching. Each method in foreign language teaching is a product of its times, under which there are various teaching objects. Generally speaking, before the turn of the 20th century, language teachers intuitively focused their teaching on linguistic knowledge. From the 1970s on, the world economy has developed rapidly, and international contacts in different areas are increasing each day. Simply having the linguistic knowledge of target language is far from satisfactory in a modern society; to develop students'communicative competence has been the main pursue of foreign language teachers. The Communicative Method is regarded as the one to realize such an aim. Now, as one of the most influential teaching methodologies, the Communicative Method has been widely accepted and used throughout the world and it has done great contributions to Chinese foreign language teaching. However, it must be accepted that Chinese students are still lack of a native-like conceptual fluency in foreign languages; they tend to use target language to "clothe"their native language conceptual flow, which causes the asymmetry between target language form and conceptual content. Besides the isolation of language learning condition, the lack of metaphorical competence in the target language is the main point. Therefore, teaching students the metaphoricity of language and developing their metaphorical competence in the target language should be regarded as part of Chinese foreign language teaching. Metaphor was treated as a figure of speech and as deviance from literal language in the traditional view. With the birth and development of cognitive linguistics in recent years, more and more attention has been paid to the cognitive function of metaphor. In the contemporary view, metaphor is regarded as a means of cognition, a matter of thought and action, and a way of language development. Metaphor is pervasive in our everyday life and language. In addition, metaphor plays a fundamental structural role in organizing our conceptual systems. Human cognitive system is metaphorically structured. Human beings intuitively look for similarities between different concepts to have a better understanding of the world so that metaphor is invented. The systematic entailment between metaphors gives a whole picture of one concept. Metaphor is culture specific, too; people in different cultural groups have formed different cognitive systems in their long historical experience, which is manifested in language on lexical, grammatical and discourse levels. Therefore, human conceptual system, which functions in the progress of human cognition, is metaphorical. It is the impetus of language development and mechanism of language formation. Conceptual metaphors are the result of human cognizing the world metaphorically. The ones that have been deeply rooted in human minds are called conventional metaphors, based on which novel metaphors are invented and one generation's novel metaphors will become the next generation's conventional metaphors. By this means, human languages develop. However, conceptual metaphors hidden in languages are often out of human awareness. By tracing back their origins in the target language and comparing them with the mother tongue conceptual metaphors will be helpful in developing students'metaphorical competence and reach a native-like conceptual fluency in the target language so as to speed up their learning of the language. Based on the contemporary view of metaphor, the thesis in Chapter One gives a retrospect of the studies on foreign language teaching both in the West and in China and the studies on metaphor, proposing the introduction of metaphor into foreign language teaching. Chapter Two first illustrates the definition, classification, characteristics and functions of metaphor from a cognitive perspective, and then states the relationship of metaphor to foreign language teaching. It further concludes that the aim of introducing metaphor into foreign language teaching is to develop students'metaphorical competence in the target language so as to help them reach a native-like conceptual fluency in the language. To investigate Chinese students'metaphorical competence in foreign languages, a survey about metaphorical competence in English is made in Chapter Three. The investigation is made on 270 students of first and second years who are all non-English majors from Shandong Normal University, Liaocheng University and...