The Role Of Grammatical Metaphor In Improving Chinese College Students' Writing Skill

The metaphor study has a very long history and the earliest interpretation of metaphor can be dated back into the time of Aristotle in ancient Greece. Most of the previous metaphor study has been constrained to the metaphorical expressions at the lexical level of language, while the metaphorical expressions at its grammatical level have seldom been touched, though a few researchers have realized the existence of GM. On the other hand, L2 writing has attracted attention from researchers. Lexical features, together with syntactic complexity, coherence and discourse features are among those features of L2 writing examined by researchers. There have been a number of studies focusing directly on the lexicon in writing, but only a few studies are available addressing importance of grammatical metaphors in writing, even fewer in the context of China.In such context, the thesis attempts to analyze grammatical metaphor systematically from Halliday's systemic-functional approach in order to explore the nature and value of it in L2 writing. Following a comprehensive review of the "grammatical metaphor", the thesis studies problems in college students' writings and analyzed fully when there are problems concerning grammatical metaphor. The relationship between grammatical metaphor and writing is explored and considered as a basis for suggestions regarding teaching strategies and methodology to help improve students' writing skills. An experiment has been conducted to see the influence of grammatical metaphor on writing and the effect of the chosen teaching strategies. The results show that students make improvements in writing from the perspective of grammatical metaphor. At the end of the thesis, the author makes several suggestions to improve students'command of grammatical metaphor through teaching reading in the hope of providing reference for foreign language teachers...