| Since Lakoff & Johnson (1980) proposed the term“conceptual metaphor”intheir famous book Metaphors We Live By, the studies on metaphors broke through thelimitations of traditional metaphor theories in width and depth. According to cognitivemetaphor theories and practices, metaphor, as an important part of human beings’cognition, is a mode of thinking people live by, and it is also conceptual in nature.Therefore, the ability to acquire, produce, and interpret metaphors in the targetlanguage is vital to language learning. Gardner and Winner (1978) named this abilityas“metaphoric competence”(MC). After that, many linguists considered this kind ofcompetence as the“third competence”subsequent to linguistic competence andcommunicative competence, and they believed that the three competences are closelyrelated and mutually complementary.Since the importance of metaphoric competence should not be neglected, manyscholars both at home and abroad have conducted researches from differentperspectives. However, most of these studies have been conducted from thetheoretical level, and the empirical studies on metaphoric competence are launchedcomparatively later and less. The study on the correlation between metaphoriccompetence and output ability is rarely seen, either. Under such conditions, thecorrelation between Chinese Non-English-Major graduates’metaphoric competenceand their output ability, which includes writing ability and speaking proficiency, willbe examined in this thesis.In order to make people realize the importance of improving their metaphoriccompetence in English learning, this study aims to investigate Non-English-Majorgraduates’level of metaphoric competence as well as its relationship with their outputability. The specific questions of this study are three-folds: (1) What is the currentsituation of the Non-English-Major graduates’metaphoric competence on the whole?(2) Does any correlation exist between the Non-English-Major graduates’metaphoriccompetence and their output ability? (3) If the correlation exists, how do the threeaspects of metaphoric competence interrelate with the two aspects of output ability? In this study, the Metaphoric Competence Test was adopted from Littlemore’s(2001) Metaphoric Competence Test, which was used to examine the 180Non-English-Major graduates’metaphoric competence in Shandong NormalUniversity. And the writing and speaking scores in the subjects’final examinationwere collected to evaluate their output ability. All the test data were processed bySPSS16.0, which yielded the statistical description and correlation analysis. Themajor findings are summarized as follows: (1) The scores of Non-English-Majorgraduates’metaphoric competence test demonstrate a normal distribution but at arelatively low level, indicating that there are still much room left for theNon-English-Major graduates to improve their metaphoric competence. (2)Non-English-Major graduates’metaphoric competence, as the results displayed in thestudy, is positively correlated to their output ability. That is, to a large extent, thelearners’level of metaphoric competence influences their output ability. (3) Thecorrelation degree is varying between the subjects’performance in the differentsections in MC test and the two aspects of output ability. The fluency of metaphorinterpretation and originality of metaphor production are positively correlated withtheir output ability; however, the ability of metaphor identification is not correlatedwith their writing ability.The research findings provide some enlightenment for English teaching andlearning. In order to improve the performance of students’language output, EFLteachers are supposed to employ the metaphorical teaching methods, and at the sametime, highlight the cultivation of the students’metaphoric competence. That will notonly enrich metaphorical language teaching theories, but also contribute to upgradingforeign language learners’ability to acquire native-like conceptual fluency. |
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