A Study On Conceptual Metaphor Theory And Teaching Culture In Foreign Language Teaching

It is believed commonly that students can't necessarily master a foreign language well with accurate pronunciation, rich vocabulary and perfect grammar in foreign language teaching, let alone using the foreign language reasonably in the real cultural language environment. The need to improve students' real communication ability requires teachers to change the traditional teaching pattern with the core of grammar again and again. In recent years, teaching culture is put into a quite important position theoretically and practically.At present, there are three methods in teaching culture: 1) when teachers explain the language phenomena, such as grammar and vocabulary, they introduce the cultural information incidentally, mostly listing the background knowledge; 2) teachers introduce the situation of western countries in the class; 3) teachers give the lectures about the foreign language literature. Though students can have some cultural awareness- through the three methods, only with them are they still in the deficiency of the understanding of the deep cultural connotations, such as social value, morality concept and so on. There exists a big discrepancy between the sound teaching culture theory and its practice. This always results in the separation of foreign language teaching and teaching culture.Metaphor has arrested much attention of scholars for more than two thousand years. Traditionally, it is regarded as a figure of speech, as more or less an ornamental device. It is related to poetry and rhetoric, not at the level of discourse, but at the level of the segment of discourse, namely the nouns. With the birth and development of cognitive linguistics, people begin to take a totally different view on metaphor. As Lakoff and Johnson state in their work, metaphor is a basic way of human thinking. It is pervasive throughout everyday language structuring, not only how we talk, but also how we think and act. Most of our ordinary conceptual system is metaphorical in nature, and thus, metaphor is a cognitive tool. This cognitive view promotes the study of metaphor to its apex, and many scholars from different fields have shown their great interest in the field. Among them, Lakoff and Johnson can be counted as prominent figures. Their Conceptual Metaphor Theory is a more systematic and influential theory. Conceptual Metaphor Theory thinks that Language is a product of human cognition and metaphor is a tool of it. Metaphor derives from the experience of culture world by human, expressed with specific language forms, and affects human' s understanding to culture world. Metaphor research can reveal the relationship between language and culture, deepen the understanding of culture. Obvious discrepancy exists in the usage of metaphor among different languages and cultures. Therefore, it is very important to study the role of Conceptual Metaphor Theory in English teaching culture. Conceptual Metaphor Theory can be applied extensively in English teaching culture. The application of Conceptual Metaphor Theory in English teaching culture can complement the deficiency of the present teaching culture. This teaching pattern is more fresh and interesting to students to arouse their learning interests and increase their analysis ability. The advantage of the adoption of the method is that it can not only improve students' culture sensibility, but develop their metaphorical competence, i. e. the use ability of a foreign language.So this thesis is intended to offer some implications of Conceptual Metaphor Theory for English vocabulary teaching, which is related to teaching culture closely. Vocabulary teaching is an integral part of foreign language teaching and has long been the core and the difficult part of English teaching. Its efficiency is directly related to the success or failure of the ultimate goal of foreign language teaching. However, for a long time, influenced by the system of test education, Chinese college English vocabulary teaching still remains at the level of spelling, pronunciation, inflection, grammar and explaining the literal meanings of words, etc. The relationship between vocabulary and culture, and vocabulary' s cultural connotations have been ignored greatly in college English teaching. It contributes to students' knowing little about target culture, only memorizing vocabulary' s conceptual meanings instead of cultural connotations and not understanding vocabulary' s meanings completely .Thus, it results in their misunderstanding and misuse to those words with cultural connotations, then the deficiency in the ability of the use of a foreign language. Based on an experiment and one semester' s teaching practice, the author finds that conceptual metaphorical way of vocabulary teaching is an effective way to improve students' cultural awareness, and then to develop their application ability of a foreign language . It puts forward the necessity and flexibility of conceptual metaphorical vocabulary teaching. It further reveals the specific significance of conceptual metaphor in improving the teaching of English polysemy, English idiomatic expressions and cultural implications based on Conceptual Metaphor Theory and vivid linguistic evidences. In the end, the author provides some referent suggestion for the application of Conceptual Metaphor Theory into English teaching culture in the future.