Conceptual Metaphor And EFL Learning In China: An Empirical Study

Researches in psychology and cognitive linguistics over the past two or three decades show that metaphor plays a central role in human linguistic and non-linguistic behavior and that the locus of metaphor lies not in language at all, but in the way we conceptualize one mental domain in terms of another. Although foreign language educators came to realize the significance of metaphor in education from the 1980s, metaphor is still treated in China's college English teaching merely as a rhetorical device and rarely touched upon or even completely ignored. The Chinese EFL learners, as a result, seldom resort to metaphor when they speak and write in English.This empirical study is designed to examine the function of conceptual metaphor in the context of EFL teaching in China. It is hypothesized that experimental teaching of conceptual metaphors could facilitate the buildup of the metaphoric competence and conceptual fluency of Chinese English learners and improve their overall English level.Two groups, one experimental and the other controlled, are chosen (each consisting of 25 college students) to participate in the study. The data collected are analyzed by virtue of the statistic software SPSS and it is found that the experimental group surpasses the controlled group in both their metaphor production, metaphor interpretation and the memorization work of those phrasal verbs with underlying conceptual metaphors. These findings verify the hypotheses concerning the relationship between conceptual metaphors and EFL learning. Implications of these findings for English language learning are then elaborated. It is suggested that Chinese college English teachers should put emphasis on the systematic teaching of metaphors, and treat the knowledge of metaphor as important as that of grammar and writing skills, since it plays such an important role in helping EFL learners construct the conceptual fluency of the target English language.