The Use Of Metaphor In The English Compositions Of Chinese College Students

In the field of cognitive linguistics, researches about cognitive metaphor have been made bymany researches, especially for the conceptual metaphor and its influence on the second languageteaching. However, there is a lack of making a research to investigate the metaphor use of Chinesecollege students in China. Although this research has existed aboard, its enlightenment and instructionis limited for Chinese college students. Therefore, this study regards Chinese college students as thesubjects in order to expose the condition and the features of their metaphor use in the process ofwriting. It is a combination of quantitative and qualitative research on the metaphor use of Chinesecollege students.This study mainly investigates the condition and the features of Chinese college students’metaphor use in the process of writing from three types of conceptual metaphor. The main questionsinclude the followings:Firstly, compared with the English native speakers, to what extent do the Chinese collegestudents testify differences relating the frequency of conceptual metaphor expressions adopted in thewriting?Secondly, whether there are obvious differences between Chinese college students with differentEnglish level on the metaphor use in writing? If there are, what are the differences?Thirdly, what are the causes of affecting the metaphor use in the English compositions ofChinese college students?The data involved writings from the 100 Chinese college students of grade two in NorthUniversity of China and 30 sample compositions of English natives, and then make an analysis of theuse of conceptual metaphor in samples. This study makes an artificial statistics for all the datecollection in accordance with three criterions of conceptual metaphor. Each of the groups of date istested by applying the SPSS13.0. This study has offered the following findings:Firstly, as for the use of conceptual metaphor, there are obvious differences between Chinesecollege students and English native speakers. In the three types of conceptual metaphor, this type ofontological metaphor is used more by Chinese college students, and personification in the ontologicalmetaphor is used more, but the native laid particular stress on container metaphor. In addition, highergroup of Chinese college students are close to the native about the quantity of orientational metaphor. Owing to the influence of mother negative transfer, Chinese college students, under manycircumstances, always use Chinese conceptual structural metaphor but not English structural metaphor,which exist obvious differences from the native. These differences state that it is quite serious thatChinese college students adopt less English conceptual metaphor. Their metaphorical competence isfar away from that of the native.Secondly, there are obvious differences between higher group and lower group in Chinesecollege students, higher group use more metaphor than that of lower group, this indicates that the useof metaphor have a certain relationship with English competence. In the whole, all the students inChina are greatly influenced by Chinese conceptual metaphor when they use English conceptualmetaphor. To different extent metaphorical concepts appear chaotic phenomenon.Thirdly, the main causes of affecting the metaphor use in the English compositions of Chinesecollege students are the cognitive level and the conceptual differences.The above findings propose some suggestions for the college English teaching. First, the Englishteachers should help students learn and master English metaphor more through the method ofcontrastive analysis. Second, in the process of teaching practice, English teachers should strengthen toteach the knowledge of conceptual metaphor, guiding and encouraging students to use metaphorcorrectly in English writings. Last but not least, the teachers should learn conceptual transfer inlanguage transfer deeply.