Grammatical Metaphor And Its Implication For The Instruction Of EST Reading

The study of grammatical metaphor (GM) can be divided up into the traditional view and modern view. The earliest study of GM can be traced back to Aristotle in the Ancient Greece, and the Middle Ages witnessed the heyday of GM in various fields of life. However, traditional view treats GM as a rhetoric method and the deviation of lexical meanings. Modern linguists study GM from various perspectives, among which cognitive linguist Lakoff and functionalist Halliday are the representatives. The former studies lexical grammar from the cognitive perspective, while the latter studies GM at the lexicogrammatical level from the systemic-functionalism perspective. In 1985, M.A.K Halliday firstly proposed GM theory in his book An Introduction to Functional Grammar, and he developed his GM theory in the following decade. This dissertation is based on his reclassification of GM proposed in 1996. In addition, Halliday applies GM in the linguistic analysis of English for Science and Technology(EST). In China, linguists mainly concentrate efforts on the introduction of GM theory and the study of relationship between GM and the comprehension of EST difficulty.As is mentioned above, this dissertation is based on the reclassification of GM types in 1996 by Halliday, aiming to explore the influence of GM on the EFL's reading comprehension of EST at sentence and discourse level, and put forward meaningful instruction of EST reading comprehension. Firstly, the dissertation carries out a qualitative study on the GM features of EST discourses, through which it is found that nominalization and adjectivalization are more frequently used GM types; then a quantitative study in the form of tests and a simple questionnaire is undertaken to explore the influence of GM on the EFL's reading comprehension of EST single sentences and discourse, and it is discovered that GM, under most cases, can impede learners'reading comprehension of single sentences, while in EST discourse, GM can facilitate reading comprehension. This discovery is of great significance for the instruction of EST reading.This dissertation is composed of five chapters.This dissertation begins with the introduction part which introduces the purpose, framework, theoretical basis and methodology of this research.Chapter One makes a review on GM theory. It briefly introduces the background knowledge of GM, then it expounds on Halliday's GM theory. In 1985, Halliday initially studied the phenomenon of GM from the systemic-functional perspective, and in the following decade, he made consistent effort in developing and perfecting this theory, and finally in 1996, he made reclassification of GM types which is the theoretical basis of the researches carried out in chapter two and chapter three.Chapter Two is firstly devoted to the background information about EST and summarizes the discourse features of EST. Then it studies the authentic EST material extracted from Nature, an authoritative scientific journal in the English world. By means of classification, analysis and statistics, it reveals that GM is the most dominant feature of EST discourse and that among the 13 GM types, nominalization and adjectivalization are more frequently applied. Then, the main functions of these two types of GM in EST discourse are elaborated to explain the reasons for the above phenomenon.Chapter Three is the core of this dissertation. In this part, a research is carried out in the form of two versions of test papers:metaphorical and congruent versions which are followed up by a questionnaire, aiming to explore the influence of GM on EST reading comprehension. The two versions of test papers respectively consist of ten EST sentences, each of which is followed by four items for the readers to choose, by doing so, their comprehension ability will be measured. And the succeeding questionnaire attempts to verify the findings of the test papers.Chapter Four offers the pedagogical implication of GM for EST reading instruction based on the research discovery of chapter three.Chapter Five is the conclusion part of this dissertation. It reviews the overall structure of this thesis and puts emphasis on the research results of chapter two and chapter three, which provide significant implication for the EST discourse reading instruction. Then it points out the deficiencies and limitations of this thesis, which await to be solved in future researches.