Raising The Awareness Of Metaphor And The Teaching Of English In High Schools

This thesis aims to demonstrate that the cognitive theory of metaphor could be applied to English teaching in high schools. At the same time it also suggests that the awareness of metaphor be raised among high-school teachers and students of English.The research of metaphor has a long history of over 2000 years. Aristotle's comparison theory and Quintilian's theory of substitution belong to the ancient rhetorical conception of metaphor. The modern cognitive conception of metaphor takes Black's interaction theory and Lakoff's conceptual metaphor as its representatives. Halliday puts forward the theory of grammatical metaphor, which studies metaphor on the lexico-grammatical level and from the perspective of sentence functions.Many scholars and experts have applied the cognitive conception of metaphor to the research of the language learning and teaching. However, most of these studies are about college English teaching and few of them concern English teaching in high schools. In this thesis, we lay emphasis on how to make use of what has been achieved in studies of cognitive metaphor to the teaching of English in high schools.In this thesis, we point out that the theories of cognitive metaphor are capable of being applied to vocabulary teaching (including the teaching of polysemous words, phrasal collocation and idioms), grammar teaching and the teaching of cross-cultures communication and so on.In conclusion, we recommend several principles and measures for English teaching in high schools in view of the characteristics of Chinese high school students. And we urge high-school English teachers to attach greater importance to raising the awareness of metaphor among their students.