The Effect Of Instruction On EFL Learners' Development Of Metaphoric Competence

This thesis is focused on the effects of instruction on the development of EFL learners' metaphoric competence.Since the publication of Lakoff & Johnson's Metaphors We Live by in 1980, metaphor research has been attracting more and more attention. In recent years, scholars have begun to attach great importance to the applied linguistic research on metaphor, i.e. the relationship between metaphor and language teaching. Danesi (1992) found that the text produced by language learners is good in terms of both language form and grammatical meaning, but it lacks the flavor of the native language for lack of metaphoric meaning. Therefore, the cultivation of metaphoric competence is bound to become an indispensable part of language teaching and learning.After discussing the cognitive view of metaphor, the classification of metaphor, the features of metaphor, the connotation of metaphoric competence, the possibility of metaphoric competence ability and the present condition of metaphor teaching at home and abroad, the author of this thesis did a trial metaphor teaching with the purpose of researching whether metaphor teaching will promote language learners' metaphoric competence. The subjects of this experiment are the students of two sophomore classes, designed to be the experimental group and the control group. During one semester's teaching and learning, the control group receives normal instruction, while the experimental group was supplemented with metaphor teaching. According to the ANOVA analysis, the metaphoric competences of the experimental group and the control group were in the same level before the experiment was carried out. While after the experiment, the metaphoric competence of the control group remained almost the same, the metaphoric competence of the experimental group got dramatic changes in three aspects. Hence, a conclusion can be arrived at: metaphor teaching can significantly improve the subjects' metaphor recognition ability, metaphor understanding ability and metaphor explanation ability; but it can not significantly improve the subjects' ability in metaphor production. This research analyzes and discusses the results and concludes the reasons for the unsuccessful results in the experiment: the production of metaphor is of complicated, which needs a long time's input and cultivation; the cultural differences between the mother tongue and the target language and the different thinking modes will also influence the production of metaphor. Lastly, the author gives some suggestions for metaphor teaching.