The Empirical Research Of The Influence Of Metaphor On Vocabulary Cognitive Strategies

This research sets out to make an exploratory study of the influence of metaphor on vocabulary learning strategies. Based on the inner relationship between metaphor and cognitive strategy, the key question of this thesis is: whether metaphor influences learners'vocabulary learning cognitive strategies significantly.The research offers an approach to teach Chinese EFL learners vocabulary that leads them away from dependency on passive learning to active learning. But Gu & Johnson's study (1996), shows that Chinese FFL learners rely on mechanical learning heavily, especially for vocabulary learning, and that they are passive learners. As for the learners, vocabulary learning is both time and energy consuming process and the efficiency is quite low. But the theoretical findings of metaphor (such as Gibbis, 1992;Lazer,1996) demonstrate that applying metaphor into vocabulary teaching reduces the difficulty level of vocabulary and facilitates the understanding and flexible using of words. Besides, the ultimate goal of education is to promote the learners to learn how to learn and learning strategy is of great importance. So this thesis intends to study the influence of metaphor on vocabulary learning cognitive strategies systematically.This empirical research attempts to explore the influence of metaphor on vocabulary learning cognitive strategies, based on one questionnaire and two vocabulary proficiency tests. The subjects are 80 non-English major postgraduates from Henan University of Science and Technology admitted in 2008. This study intends to achieve the following purposes: first, this study aims to test whether the integration of metaphor into the postgraduate English intensive reading class apparently changes the students'vocabulary learning cognitive strategies. Second, this study attempts to find out whether the metaphorical training helps the students improve their vocabulary proficiency compared with traditional English vocabulary teaching methods. Third, the present study tries to explore the relationship between the change of vocabulary learning cognitive strategies and the students' vocabulary proficiency. By using SPSS version 11.5 to analyze the descriptive statistics, independent samples test, Pearson coefficient, the major findings of the current research are listed below:1. The integration of metaphorical teaching leads to the significant change of preferences among vocabulary cognitive strategies. The mental association strategy which corresponds with metaphorical thinking becomes the main options of the experiment subjects and the mechanical learning conditions have improved;2. The metaphorical training helped the subjects enhance their vocabulary proficiency, compared with the traditional teaching methods. Once the students in the experiment class were used to adopting the metaphorical way to learn vocabulary, they can analyze the encountered metaphorical vocabulary expressions consciously and expand their vocabulary.3. By correlation analysis, we found that, the improvement of vocabulary proficiency has a close relation with the change of cognitive strategies after the experiment. There is significantly high positive correlation between vocabulary proficiency and mental association strategy, vocabulary proficiency and context strategy. The correlation between vocabulary proficiency and reviewing strategy, vocabulary proficiency and guessing strategy is moderate. Moreover, there is significantly negative correlation between vocabulary proficiency and mechanical learning strategy. The results explain that the high frequencies of mental association strategy using give rise to the promotion of vocabulary proficiency. The findings have practical implications for English teaching. First, teachers should realize the importance of metaphor and integrate the metaphorical meaning into the vocabulary teaching. Second, in the processing of polysemous words teaching, the teacher should help the students clarify the metaphorical relationship among different meanings. What's more, the teacher should analyze the change of meaning from the cognitive process with the help of etymology. Third, the teacher should teach the students how to learn and pay more attention to the training of learning strategies which can not only inspire students'intrinsic motivation for learning, but also promote second language acquisition.