A Study Of The Effect Of Teaching Conceptual Metaphor On The Learning Of Polysemies

Metaphor had not only been seen as a figure of speech but also considered important in poetics, aesthetics and epistemology for long before philosophers and cognitive linguistics have recognized it as powerful cognitive tools for our conceptualization of abstract categorization. According to Lakoff and Johnson (1980), we have a conceptual metaphor when one conceptual domain is understood in terms of another conceptual domain. Conceptual metaphor is omnipresent in our life.Language, in essence,is metaphor. Metaphor not only exists in poetry and literature but also in our daily life. Many metaphors are closely connected to our daily lives. Nearly all daily things can lead to metaphorical expressions, including different parts of human bodies, health and disease, animals, etc. For example, we understand love in terms of journey, so we have the conceptual metaphor LOVE IS JOURNEY. And we may always hear of such kind of metaphorical expressions like"we're at a crossroad". Apart from being part of our language, conceptual metaphor also gives new insights into foreign language vocabulary teaching. This thesis is designed to explore the feasibility and effectiveness of the application of conceptual metaphor to the teaching of polysemous words. It proposed three hypotheses: The general hypothesis is that conceptual metaphor contributes to the teaching of polesemous words;The first sub-hypothesis is that the experiment class will perform better than the control class in terms of short-term memory of the polysemous words;The second sub-hypothesis is that the experiment class will perform better than the control class in terms of long-term memory of the polysemous words.To verify this, an empirical study was undertaken within one month. Two classes of the same English proficiency at Shenyang Institute of Aeronautical Engineering participated in the experiment. It consists of a pre-test, test 1 and test 2. The experiment class was taught with conceptual metaphors while the control class was taught with traditional methods concerning the teaching of polysemies.After the experiment, a careful analysis of the statistic data via SPSS 13.0 was conducted, the statistic results show that the metaphor-based approach turned out to be more effective than traditional approaches.In addition, some pedagogical implications are derived from this experiment, namely, enhancing student's metaphor-awareness; improving student's metaphorical competence; establishing conceptual metaphor models; exploring the relationship between the original meaning and the metaphorical meaning.It is worth noting that this approach works as a complementary technique to other ways of teaching polesemous words instead of a substitute for other approaches. .