Metaphor Comprehension And Its Countermeasures In English Teaching

Among the existing questions in the aspect of second-language teaching, one ofwhich is that learners are poor in acquiring conceptual fluency of a second language.Conceptual fluency defines, according to metaphor structure, to understand how languagereflects concept and encode it. Studies show that language learners lack systematicaltraining in constructing concept of the target language, so it is important to strengthenmetaphor competence. Metaphorical language appears everywhere in the forms of lexis,sentences and discourses which naturally affects the students reading comprehensionability so that they can not grasp the general meaning and explain the detail nor analyze,infer, judge nor synthesize the contents, and finally can not read the author's opinion andattitude …(Teaching –outline of College English [ Revision] 1999: 3). Facing theproblems of metaphorical language comprehension, how we should help students betterrecognize and comprehend different types of metaphors is a key to improve the students'comprehension ability.With the rising of metaphor-studying, researchers from the fields of cognitivescience, psychics etc also get down to study metaphor. They interpret that metaphor playsan important role in human cognition and social activity (Shu Dingfang, 2000), whichformed modern cognition view: Metaphor is not only a language but, in essence, acognition. metaphor is the result and tool of human knowing and conceiving the world.Lakoff and Johnson (1980) summarize that the essence of metaphor is understanding andexperiencing one kind of thing in terms of another.Being of multi-functions, metaphor is a thinking phenomenon with language as acarrier. In cognitive psychology, metaphor is reflection of human cognition towards theworld;in language system, it drives language's development and variation;in rhetoric, itis the power tool to express complicated things and thought. Owing to the complicatedfunctions of metaphor, metaphor must be comprehended from the multi-aspects. Nobasic differences exist between metaphor comprehension and literal comprehension.Metaphor comprehension involves meaning inference, schema knowledge, context,imagination and creativity etc, all of which have difference out of sameness.In this dissertation, a survey on metaphor comprehension is conducted amongcollege students, and the participants are 270 non-English major undergraduates fromShandong Normal University. The questionnaire consists of sixteen items. All the itemsare metaphors selected from College English book (21 Century College English and NewHorizon College English);First of all, participants are required to judge whether items inthe questionnaire are metaphors or not, and in the second step of the questionnaire,participants are required to give explanations to the sixteen items in order to perceive howpeople understand these metaphorical sentences. The results of the sixteen items wereanalyzed from a qualitative approach.The dissertation consists of 5 Chapters. Chapter 1 mainly illustrates the definition ofmetaphor;relationship between metaphor and language, metaphor and cognition,language and cognition;necessity of studying metaphor comprehension in Englishteaching. Chapter 2 mainly states theoretical view of metaphor comprehension in Englishteaching, that is, the comparison view, the interaction view, the pragmatic view, and thecognitive view;the nature of comprehension of metaphorical language and relationshipbetween metaphor comprehension and foreign language acquisition. In Chapter 3, asurvey on metaphor comprehension among college students is conducted, and then we doa theoretical analysis on collected data. We reach the results that minor students'linguistic competence is poor;most students' metaphorical competence, especially,metaphor thinking, is also deficient and among the four factors which affects metaphorcomprehension, culture and image schema seriously affects students' metaphorcomprehension, so correspondent suggestion and countermeasures are put forward inChapter 4, that is, students' English linguistic competence need be strengthened;students'metaphorical competence, esp. metaphor thinking, need to be cultivated, so is culturalawareness. Chapter 5 is limitation and prospect of the dissertationIn this dissertation, four factors that affect metaphor comprehension were putforward and researched. The collected data is analyzed. On the basis of all the formermetaphor comprehension theories, three constructive countermeasures are given. I hopethey can play an active role in college English teaching and learning. The more importantis that improvement on metaphor comprehension competence can facilitate learners'conceptual fluency.