The Application Of Image Schema In English Discourse Teaching

Since the new project has been proposed, the project of discourse teaching hasgreatly attracted the experts and scholars' attention. In recent years, some experts applythe theories of functional linguistics, psychological linguistics, stylistics, and textlinguistics in English teaching. With the cognitive linguistics successfully applied thetheory into English teaching. Image schema, the new concept in cognitive linguistics hasgot deep development in the English teaching, but the application of this theory indiscourse teaching still needs to be lucubrated.Image schema is one of the most important projects of cognitive linguistics, it playsan important role in constructing domain, forming concept, analyzing metaphor,understanding meaning and reasoning. In discourse teaching, image schema will helpstudents to understand the author's emotion, the text structure and the national backgroundculture of the discourse. Image schema theory can improve English discourse teaching to anew level and reinforce the students' comprehensive ability and cognitive thinking ability.This paper applies image schema theory as the theoretical foundation, and adopts themethod of qualitative analysis. In this paper, it will put forward a new perspective ofdiscourse teaching philosophy which is directed by image schema theory of cognitivelinguistics, and the paper will illustrate the theoretical foundation, teaching perspectiveand teaching steps of this new teaching model, and then state its feasibilities andimplications to the English discourse teaching.The study proves that firstly image schema theory play a vital role in motivation,reasoning, and constructing meaning in discourse comprehension. In discourse teaching,image schema theory conduces to help students to process discourse information, infer andconstruct the discourse structure, and image schema can reinforce students' learningability and enthusiasm.Secondly, based on image schema theory discourse teaching is a new perspective ofdiscourse teaching. This discourse teaching method not only teaches the contents of words,grammar and sentence as we know in the past, it pays more attention to the meaning formation, reasoning and construction. And this new teaching method can help studentsunderstand the author's emotions and the background knowledge.