Research On The Application Of Conceptual Metaphor To Teaching Non-English Majors English

The study of metaphor has a history of more than two thousand years. The traditional metaphor theory just sees metaphor as a rhetoric linguistic phenomenon, while the modern metaphorical theory links metaphor to people's everyday life and thinking process, and relates metaphor to the interaction between people's cognition, experience and the outside world. It can be seen that modern metaphorical theory regards metaphor as a way of thinking and cognition. Metaphor pervasively exists in people's everyday life and language, and plays an important role in constructing people's conceptual system, which have been agreed on by most scholars in the relevant study field.This paper analyzes the metaphorical theories in history and points out their weaknesses. Through careful analysis, it is considered that the conceptual metaphor by Lakoff and Johnson is the most comprehensive and systematic one. The conceptual theory regards metaphor as a cognitive phenomenon but not merely a linguistic phenomenon. On that basis, this paper lays emphasis on conceptual metaphor and the study related to conceptual metaphor. In introducing conceptual metaphor, its categorization and characteristics are analyzed. Metaphorical cognition is also analyzed, and its cognitive basis in experientialism and image schema theory is also analyzed.On the basis of theoretical analysis, metaphor underlying English vocabulary learning and writing is analyzed. Considering that conceptual metaphor and language are closely related and so conceptual metaphor and English teaching and leaning are also closely related, this paper is to reach the purpose of applying conceptual metaphor to the English language teaching process and to make use of conceptual metaphor to facilitate non-English majors' English language learning.The author of this paper conducts an experiment based on the application of conceptual metaphor to English language teaching. Two classes of college non-English majors took part in the experiment. From our observation and analysis of some exam papers and a questionnaire, it can be concluded that conceptual metaphor can facilitate English study by arousing students'interest in the new way of English study, facilitating their vocabulary learning and writing and making them more confident in learning English.Applying metaphor to English language teaching will make the college English learning more active. But it should be pointed out that the experiments introduced in this paper about applying modern metaphorical theory to English teaching are just a trial, and more practical and systematic metaphorical teaching methods need to be found through further research. Besides, some problems concerning the application of metaphor theory to English teaching need to be solved, such as how metaphor can guide the students'cognition, how metaphor plays a role in English learning, and to students of what level the metaphorical teaching method can be more properly applied.