A Study On The Correlation Between Metaphoric Competence And English Proficiency Of College Non-English Majors

In 1970s and 1980s, cognitive linguistics has highlighted the importance as well as the ubiquity of metaphor in language. Cognitive linguistics suggests that language is systematically constructed and developed during the process of human beings'experiencing and functioning in the external world, and metaphor, which is traditionally regarded as a figure of speech parasitic on language, is a means people perceive and experience the world, a means of thought and life. Metaphor is a cognitive tool and is conceptual in nature. Based on these, cognitive metaphor theory and practice propose that the ability to acquire, produce, and interpret metaphors in the target language is vital to language learning. Gardner and Winner (1978) call it metaphoric competence (MC), a term analogous to Chomsky's linguistic competence and Hymes'communicative competence (1972), now attracting more and more attention from language researchers. Metaphorical competence, as the complement to linguistic competence and communicative competence, is a much higher demand to language learners.Analyzed previous researches, no approach has been come up with to cultivate metaphorical competence and the test to check up students'metaphorical competence is still under much controversy. Especially, at home, although we have already recognized that metaphoric competence plays an important part in language learning, the empirical study about metaphoric competence is comparatively later and weaker. The study of in what measure metaphorical competence infiltrates its influence into L2 comprehensive proficiency or discrete aspects remains barely untouchedSo in the hope of laying the groundwork for a better understanding and addressing metaphoric competence in the ESL classroom, the research reported in this thesis aims to investigate Chinese EFL learners'level of metaphoric competence as well as its relationship with English proficiency. The questions of this study are three-folds: (1) What is the general picture of the Chinese EFL learners'metaphoric competence? (2) Does metaphoric competence have any correlation with the learners'English proficiency? (3) If any, how does the metaphoric competence interrelate with English proficiency?There were 60 non-English majors in their second academic year involved in this study. The metaphoric competence test adapted from Littlemore (2001) was employed to assess the level of the Chinese EFL learners'metaphoric competence. And the score report of learners'CET-4 was collected to evaluate their English proficiency. The scores of metaphoric competence test and those of CET-4, which were calculated both holistically and analytically, were processed by SPSS 13.0 to measure the correlation between these variables. The data analysis yielded the following findings: Firstly, the scores of participants in the metaphoric competence test display a normal distribution but at the relatively lower level, indicating that L2 learners'metaphoric competence is yet to be developed. Secondly, Chinese EFL learners'metaphoric competence, as their scores indicated in the test, is substantially and positively correlated to their English proficiency level, which suggests the learners'level of metaphoric competence may presumably vary along with English proficiency. It may rightly warrant pedagogical approach that introduces metaphorical competence into real teaching practice. Thirdly, there is a varying degree of correlation between the learners'performance in the different sections in MC test and CET-4. On one hand, the first two aspects in metaphoric competence test (namely: find meaning in metaphor and fluency of metaphor interpretation) correlate significantly with scores in CET-4. And the originality of metaphor production doesn't correlate with CET-4. This can be explained by the fact that CET-4 examines more about students'receptive skills in English study than about their productive respect. On the other hand, the subjects'level of metaphoric competence displays remarkable positive correlation to their writing, reading, and listening performance in CET-4 except cloze. It implies that the test-takers process the information through more or less of their metaphor knowledge. And metaphoric competence in a large measure may ensure a greater natural degree of the learners''literalness'.Finally, from the pedagogical perspective, the author proposes teaching metaphor as a subject and metaphorical teaching as a teaching approach to improve L2 learning.