Research On Conceptual Metaphor Teaching Method Of L2 Vocabulary At College Level From Cognitive Perspective

Through the development of more than two hundred years, researches on second language vocabulary teaching have provided various teaching methods, which all promote teaching and learning of second language vocabulary to some extent. However, to a majority of second language learners, vocabulary is still an obstacle, affecting their progress of second language acquisition.With the rise of cognitive linguistics, some researchers began to analyze teaching and learning of second language vocabulary from cognitive perspective. Abundant metaphors in language and human beings'universal cognition are the research foundation of this thesis. This thesis intends to research on conceptual metaphor teaching method of second language vocabulary from cognitive perspective. In literature and rhetoric, metaphor has long been considered as a figure of speech for better description. The development of cognitive science aroused interest from linguists and other scholars again in metaphor. It is Lakoff and Johnson who made the research on conceptual metaphor to its summit. They claim that"human thought processes are largely metaphorical".In order to judge the effect of conceptual metaphor teaching method, students from the experimental class and the control class took the pretest and the posttest before and after the ten-week long teaching process. Students from the experimental class completed as well the questionnaire after the posttest. Scores of the pretest and the posttest are analyzed with the software of SPSS.Results of the analysis show that scores of students from the experimental class have improved significantly, compared with those of students from the control class with no significant difference, which suggest that conceptual metaphor teaching method can help students promote the effectiveness of remembering new words and their metaphorical competence. Answers to the questionnaire indicate that students consider conceptual metaphor teaching method more useful than the traditional way.Evidences from many aspects can prove that there is a universal cognition among human beings. But due to history, culture and experiences, this universal cognition is represented variously, which is not impossible to understand for people from different places. For the situations in which there are no correspondences between words of mother language and second language, teachers'explanations from cognitive view are needed. The advantages are motivations between words and meanings are found out to help students comprehend and remember words, and students can make use of knowledge of conceptual metaphor to guess new meanings of learned words. Besides the application to vocabulary teaching, conceptual metaphor can also be applied to teaching and learning of foreign language reading, grammar, translation, etc.