An Empirical Study Of The Application Of Conceptual Metaphor To EFL Vocabulary Teaching

Vocabulary, an important factor that affects the teaching of semantics, grammar and syntax, has drawn the attention of many scholars and teachers, and accordingly, the research in this area is productive. However, vocabulary remains a hard nut to crack for Chinese EFL students. A research conducted by Li Fuyin (2004) showed that among the vocabulary problems of college students, limited amount of vocabulary, wrong usage of certain lexical items and poor usage of idiomatic expressions ranked the highest. There is still a long way for us to go on the research of vocabulary teaching. This thesis attempts to find an effective method via applying conceptual metaphor to EFL vocabulary teachingThe study of metaphor can be dated back to more than two thousand years ago. The traditional view of metaphor regarded it as a figure of speech, a deviant use of language (Ungerer & Schmid, 1996). However, the contemporary cognitive view holds that metaphor is a ubiquitous phenomenon, and that 70% of our daily language is metaphorical (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980). A representative of this view is Lakoff and Johnson's Conceptual Metaphor Theory, (ibid.) They argue that metaphor is omnipresent and it constructs our thinking; that a conceptual metaphor is a mapping from the concrete source domain to the abstract target domain; and that the mappings of conceptual metaphor are systematic.Conceptual metaphor plays an important role in the process of vocabulary evolution, and it founctions as the basis of semantic change. First, once metaphorization is admitted and used widely, it is to become a new item of a word and this word is likely to become polysemy; polysemous words are not created at random, but rather, they are organized due to the metaphorical usage of our language. Second, conceptual metaphors constitutes the motivation for idioms.On the basis of the theories stated above, an experiment was designed to examine the effect of the application of conceptual metaphor to the EFL vocabulary teaching. The participants, 124 sophomores from Shandong Jianzhu University majoring in civil engineering, were assigned into two classes: the experimental class and the control class, 62 students in each class. The teaching materials for the experimental class were arranged around the conceptual metaphors concerned while those for the control class were designed according to the topics. Both the classes had fifty minutes to learn the materials (the same forty lexical items in the same sentences). The teaching and learning process of the experimental class was: the teacher taught the information of conceptual metaphor for 10 minutes; the teacher presented the material for 20 minutes; and the students discussed and used the vocabulary items for another 20 minutes. The process for the control class was: the students read the materials silently or aloud for 10 minutes; the teacher presented the materials for 20 minutes; and the students memorized the materials for another 20 minutes. Fifty minutes later, an immediate test was given, which consisted of blank-filling and paraphrasing questions. And a week later, a delay test was given, using the same test papers as in the immediate test.The data were collected and Independent Samples T-Tests were conducted, utilizing SPSS 11.5. The results of the experiment proves that the application of conceptual metaphor to EFL vocabulary teaching can facilitate long-term memory and understanding, and therefore effective.