Conceptual Metaphor Theory And Its Implications For College English Vocabulary Teaching

The study of metaphor has been a concern for linguists for more than 2000 years. Traditionally it is regarded as a completely linguistic phenomenon, a rhetoric device employed to achieve the effect of comparison in literary works. Both Aristotle's comparison view and Quitillian's substitution view claim that metaphor is an ornament, a deviance of language, chiefly used for rhetoric or ornamental purpose. In the early 1980s, Lakoff & Johnson put forward Conceptual Metaphor Theory in their collaboration work Metaphors We Live By, which is a milestone and a revolution in metaphor research. They claim that metaphor is pervasive throughout everyday language structuring not only how we talk, but also how we think and act, and our ordinary conceptual system is metaphorical in nature; basically, metaphor is a cognitive tool and language is a product of human cognition. Therefore it is of great importance and necessity to study the role of conceptual metaphor in foreign language teaching.In this thesis, the first chapter briefly reviews and analyses the theoretical background, Lakoff and Johnson's main works on Conceptual Metaphor Theory, and the situation of research on foreign language teaching related to Conceptual Metaphor Theory at home and abroad. The second chapter explores carefully its philosophical basis, working mechanism, basic types, main characteristics, and illustrates with lots of vivid examples its theoretical significance in English vocabulary teaching, especially in polysemy analysis, idioms analysis and words connection analysis. The third chapter is an empirical study. Two classes with the nearly same vocabulary level participated in this contrastive teaching experiment, where different teaching methods were used. The experiment consists of pre-test, post-test 1, post-test 2 and a series of teaching and learning activities. After the careful analysis of the data of three tests, the author draws the conclusion: the introduction of conceptual metaphor into classroom vocabulary teaching can produce better results in students' short-term and long-term vocabulary retention than traditional learning such as rote learning and repetition. It can consolidate students' vocabulary retention, arouse students' great interest in vocabulary study and thus enhance students' vocabulary learning ability to a certain degree.The fourth chapter advocates several suggestions on college English vocabulary teaching based on the practical situation of current college English vocabulary teaching: giving priority to basic words; analyzing the semantic motivation of words; constructing conceptual metaphor models and connnecting vocabulary teaching with culture. The conclusive part also points out the limitations of the thesis.