Metaphor Awareness Raising And College English Vocabulary Teaching For Non-English Majors

Traditional metaphoric studies treat metaphor as a rhetoric device. Lakoff & Johnson (1980) claim that metaphor is an important cognitive tool of human beings and put forward the famous Conceptual Metaphor Theory. Nowadays, metaphor has been a popular issue in linguistics, philosophy, psychology, translation and some other disciplines. The publication of Researching and Applying Metaphor (Cameron & Low, 2001) indicates the study of metaphor has entered an applying research phase. Many foreign researchers have proved the facilitation of metaphor in FLT through empirical studies. But metaphor has little impact on FLT and is still undervalued in FLT realm at home and abroad.Based on Boers (2000) and Berendi, et al (2008), the present study tries to testify the results of the two previous studies and further explore the utility of conceptual metaphor in EFL vocabulary teaching by experiment.There are two research questions in the research:Question 1:Does metaphor awareness raising in EFL vocabulary teaching facilitate short-term and long-term retention of vocabulary?Question 2:Does metaphor awareness raising facilitate the autonomous learning of EFL metaphoric expressions?Two classes with nearly the same English level and metaphoric level at Meizhou Normal Branch of Jia Ying University were involved in the experiment, which lasted 8 weeks. The experiment contained one pre-test, one-month metaphor awareness raising in experimental class including one metaphor lecture and a three-week special metaphor awareness raising course, two contrastive vocabulary teaching classes in which the experimental class and the control class learnt the same metaphoric expressions with CM grouping method and the traditional approach respectively, and three post-tests. The data collected were analyzed by software SPSS 17.0. Based on the result, it can be concluded that combining metaphor awareness raising with EFL vocabulary teaching may facilitate the retention and autonomous learning of metaphoric expressions.Other major findings of the present research include metaphor awareness is more beneficial to long-term retention than to short-term retention; metaphor awareness raising greatly facilitates the retention of the meanings of vocabularies, but its help to the retention of form is less obvious; closeness of languages has no great influence on the learning process; metaphor awareness raising might facilitate the autonomous learning of EFL metaphoric expressions, but it does not facilitate the autonomous learning of metaphoric expressions related to unknown CMs as well as it does those related to learnt CMs and high-score group is more capable of comprehending conceptual metaphors and related metaphoric expressions than low-score group.Based on the results and findings of the empirical research, some pedagogical implications for how to raise metaphor awareness and how to combine metaphor awareness raising with college English vocabulary teaching were given for the reference of English teachers.On a whole, combining metaphor awareness raising with EFL vocabulary teaching is not only beneficial but also feasible, however owing to the limitations of the study, further explorations in this aspect are necessary.