Conceptual Metaphor And Metaphor Teaching

Metaphors are regarded as figurative language for ornament and deviance from literal language in traditional theory. With the publication of Lakoff & Johnson's influential book Metaphors We Live By, the well-known conceptual metaphor theory has been presented and elaborated in front of us. They claim that"metaphor is pervasive in everyday life, not just in language but in thought and action. Our ordinary conceptual system, in terms of which we think and act, is fundamentally metaphorical in nature."Its cognitive power allows us to understand the abstract, unfamiliar and inherently unstructured concept in terms of the concrete, familiar and highly structured concept on the basis of human physical, psychological and cultural experiences. However, in foreign language teaching, metaphors are long believed to present difficulty for foreign language learners. Metaphor teaching is not only teaching the figurative language but also cultivating the cognitive and thinking model in target language. Metaphor teaching has been far less explored in English language teaching in China. It has often been suggested that metaphor was solely a matter of language without much motivation of the deep underlying conceptual system. Learners seem to lack the conceptual appropriateness that characterizes the corresponding discourse texts of native speakers. To put it another way, students"speak"with the formal structures of the target language, but they"think"in terms of their native conceptual systems. It is an obstacle for learner to acquire native-like English.In order to improve the current metaphor teaching, the survey and the discussion is carried out. Chapter 1 reviews the brief history of metaphor study and Layoff's contemporary conceptual metaphor theory, briefly introducing the definition of conceptual metaphor, its classification and the features of conceptual theory. Chapter 2 first discusses the close relation between conceptual metaphor and metaphor teaching, and then presents the influence of conceptual metaphor on metaphorical competence and conceptual fluency. Finally it states the necessity of reform the current metaphor teaching. Chapter 3 presents the survey of English major's metaphor learning and its finding. The survey based on cognitive approach and cross-linguistic contrast aims at finding out difficulty in learning the different types of metaphorical units and interference of conceptual metaphor in metaphorical comprehension and production. Chapter 4 renders some feasible suggestions about how to teach metaphor based on the survey findings, such as teaching metaphor grouped by conceptual metaphor and based on underlying deep conceptual system in English, cross-linguistic conceptual metaphor comparison, embedding conceptual metaphor in test books, as well as applying conceptual metaphor in improving language output.In China, few of researches on the basis of conceptual metaphor theory are carried out to investigate the difficulty in metaphor learning. The result of the survey can be used for future metaphor teaching and the research method in this paper combines the linguistic theory with teaching practices, which will bridge the gulf between cognitive linguistics and applied linguistics.