Correlation Between Receptive Metaphoric Competence And Reading Proficiency

Since Aristotle's "Rhetoric" was initiated more than two thousand years ago, the study on metaphor has experienced overwhelming and radical developments and changes. The point that deserves attention is that the dividing line between the classic view and the modern one is the position they hold on the identity of metaphor. The classic view represented by Aristotle holds that literal language is true and primary while metaphor is a matter of words, rather than a thought and metaphoric language lies outside ordinary, everyday language. Nevertheless, until the recent years, the study on metaphor has realized its value from the cognitive perspective. The representatives in this area are Lakoff and Johnson, who focus their metaphor study on cognitive theory and historically propose in their book "Metaphors We Live by" the conceptual metaphor theories. According to Lakoff & Johnson (1980), metaphor is pervasive in daily life, not just in language but in thought and action, and our ordinary conceptual system is fundamentally metaphoric in nature. Similar to Chomsky's linguistic competence and Hymes' communicative competence, Pollio and Smith (1980) for the first time put forward the concept of metaphoric competence (MC). Furthermore, some scholars developed the definition of MC step by step. In her recent study, Jeannette Littlemore (2001a) elaborates MC from the following four aspects: originality of metaphorical production; fluency of metaphor interpretation; ability to find meaning in metaphor; and speed in finding meaning in metaphor. Then Azuma (2005) generalizes MC as the composition of receptive metaphoric competence (R-MC) and productive metaphoric competence (P-MC).Reading comprehension, whether in first or second language acquisition, is a very complex mental process in which the reader uses his mentality to obtain meaning from written material. Goodman (1969) defines reading as a psycholinguistic process in which reading starts with a linguistic surface representative encoded by the writer and ends with the decoding by the reader. As Richards (1965) points out, in the area of EFL teaching and learning, the communicative methodology has derived attention and development, one of which is to make EFL learners totally immersed in the foreign or second language environment. Subsequently, it is natural for the learners to get in touch with more and more authentic target language materials that certainly contain a large number of English metaphoric expressions. We cannot get through three sentences of fluid discourse without it (metaphor). It can be inferred that at least to some extent the metaphoric competence of an EFL learner can influence or even determine his reading proficiency.However, although the research findings about metaphor both home and abroad are so fruitful, the application of metaphor to SLA is far from demanded. One of the reasons might be due to the low accessibility of the target language (Azuma, 2006), and another one might be that the significance of metaphor instruction in the classroom has not gained enough attention. It is known that the performance in tests can play an effective role as feedback, especially in China, to cause EFL learners to retrospect their past achievement and improve the future learning. So if it can be verified the positive or significant correlation between learners' MC and their corresponding performance in the language tests, both the teachers and learners are more likely to pay attention to metaphoric instruction and learning in future time.Aiming to make clear how MC, especially the R-MC is correlated with reading proficiency of EFL learners, the author endeavors to do some empirical research on 80 freshmen majoring in English from Southwest University, China, by means of two paper testing (R-MC test and reading test) and data analyzing. It turns out to be significant positive correlation between the scores of R-MC and the scores of reading comprehension test. The result of the scores both for R-MC test and reading proficiency test is also encouraging. The scores of R-MC test are comparatively low and it proves to be significant relationship between scores of R-MC test and reading proficiency test. Therefore, MC, especially R-MC in this paper, is especially significant to the improvement of reading proficiency, and furthermore, to the promotion of EFL learners' language proficiency in China.