A Study On Raising Metaphor Awarenes In TEFL Class

Now that metaphor is recognized as being pervasive in language, it is argued that more attention should be given to the teaching of strategies for comprehending and generating metaphors in L2. The relation between raising metaphor awareness and language teaching and learning efficiency remains unclear. To tackle this issue in the field of TEFL, a combined method is employed in this research. It is carried out both quantitatively and qualitatively.The qualitative study further investigates into the universality of metaphor and metaphorical usage in Chinese and English, on both lexical level and conceptual level. It also aims at finding out whether the universality or similarity between the two languages can be exploited in TEFL to college students through Raising Metaphor Awareness (RMA), to achieve the effect of positive transfer. In this thesis readers are offered some examples of common patterns in historical change of meaning of a number of lexical items both in English and Chinese, and a comparison is carried out simultaneously.The quantitative study is based upon the previous theoretical discussions; it includes two separate parts, which are the Immediate Recall experiment and the Metaphorical Idioms Test. The Immediate Recall experiment has two tests, which are designed to investigate the issues about whether the learner's capability of memorizing and using vocabulary can be improved through RMA. The aim of the Metaphorical Idioms test is to investigate how well the Chinese college learners of English can understand metaphorical idioms and to probe into the problem of deviation in comprehension of metaphorical expressions by Chinese college learners of English. And through the investigations mentioned above the study intends to find out if there is a practical possibility of transporting metaphor from L1 into L2, i.e. a positive transfer of metaphor knowledge from Chinese to English.Both the qualitative and quantitative analysis provide strong evidences to support the previous hypotheses. First, Chinese and English share a significant similarity in original metaphoric image of words. Secondly, Chinese and English conceptualize some emotional experiences metaphorically in very similar ways. Thirdly, positive transfer of metaphorical usage across L1 and L2 is possible; at the same time some culture-specific metaphor should be used more cautiously. Finally and also most importantly, RMA do help the students a lot to memorize words and comprehend texts, especially those metaphor-rich texts.The study implies clearly that raising metaphor awareness through discussions and comparisons of metaphors in L1 and L2 is a useful approach to help learners to understand and appropriately apply metaphors.