The Development Of Metaphorical Competence In EFL Learnwes

Researches on metaphor have become one of the fastest-growing and important areas of language research over the past twenty years, and metaphor is now regarded as central to language use. It is also of considerable importance to the teaching and learning of foreign languages. Metaphorical competence, alike linguistic competence, is a very important aspect to judge the learners' language proficiency. So, this paper aims to investigate the development of metaphorical competence among Chinese EFL learners.In this thesis, the author employs the form of case study to make an investigation on the EFL learners' comprehending and producing metaphors in English. The subjects are 88 college students with different English proficiency, who are all from a key state university in shanghai. This study makes two groups of contrastive analysis on these survey data. One is between the high-level group students and low-level group students; the other is among the four types of different metaphors.The results of this study can be summarized as follows. All subjects, whether the high-level group students or low-level group students, are still at the low level of metaphorical competence, especially in terms of producing metaphors in English. Some discrepancies between the two groups exist, but are not significant. In addition, when the L2 concept system differs from that of L1, almost all subjects have difficulties in comprehending and producing the L2 metaphors. When the L2 concept system is same as that of L1, but the linguistic forms are not identical, many learners have difficulties in comprehending and producing the L2 metaphors.These findings contribute to a better understanding of the status quo of Chinese EFL learners' metaphorical competence and some existing difficulties, and identify that bringing conceptual metaphor into English language teaching process will be a must.