Conceptual Metaphor Theory And Its Pedagogical Implications For Idiom Teaching

Metaphor has arrested much attention of scholars for more than two thousand years.Traditionally, it is regarded as a figure of speech, as more or less an ornamental device. It isrelated to poetry and rhetoric, not at the level of discourse, but at the level of the segment ofdiscourse, namely the nouns. With the birth and development of cognitive linguistics, peoplebegin to take a totally different view on metaphor. As Lakoff and Johnson state in their work,metaphor is a basic way of human thinking. It is pervasive throughout everyday languagestructuring, not only how we talk, but also how we think and act. Most of our ordinaryconceptual system is metaphorical in nature, and thus, metaphor is a cognitive tool. Thiscognitive view promotes the study of metaphor to its apex, and many scholars from differentfields have shown their great interest in the field. Among them, Lakoff and Johnson can becounted as prominent figures. Their Conceptual Metaphor Theory is a more systematic andinfluential theory. Language is a product of human cognition and metaphor is a tool of it.Therefore, it is of great importance to study the role of metaphor, especially conceptualmetaphor, in foreign language teaching.Idioms are an important part of language and culture of a society. They are often hard tounderstand, and harder to use correctly. Yet mastering the use of idioms is often a mark of aperson's command of the language. Due to the nature of idioms, learning them is a difficulttask for students and teaching them is also a challenge for teachers. However, it is found thestudy of Conceptual Metaphor Theory sheds light on idiom learning and teaching.The thesis intends to explore the pedagogical implications of Conceptual Metaphor Theoryand offer some proposal to apply this theory to idiom teaching. After a critical survey of thetheoretical background, definition, working mechanisms, classification and example analysesetc. of conceptual metaphor, the author of this thesis attempts to give a suggested method ofapplying Conceptual Metaphor Theory to idiom teaching. Lastly, an empirical experiment isconducted aiming at examining the approach. The result of the T-test demonstrates that thisapproach is more efficient than the traditional way of teaching idioms. In addition, the studentstake more interest and participation in the process of idiom learning.It should be clear that this approach is not meant as a substitute for any established idiomteaching methods. Rather, it is a complementary technique that can be integrated with variousother approaches to idiom teaching.