The Awareness Of Conceptual Metaphor And English Vocabulary Teaching

Conceptual metaphor theory is a revolutionary discovery made by Lakoff and Johnson in1980. Conceptual metaphor permeates our everyday language. In contrast to traditional metaphor, it is a cognitive mechanism rather than a rhetorical device to embellish language in poetry and literature. Conceptual metaphor serves to facilitate interpreting an abstract concept (target domain) in terms of a specific concept (source domain). In a sense, conceptual metaphor is a linguistic law. Not only are cognitive linguists passionate about carrying on in-depth studies on it, applied linguists are also devoted to taking advantage of it so as to address issues in real world. Vocabulary is such an integral part of any language that it has a great impact on one’s proficiency of a target language. Traditional English vocabulary teaching approaches are unsatisfactory in one way or another. The strengths of conceptual metaphor can eradicate some drawbacks of current English vocabulary teaching methods. This thesis makes a brief introduction of conceptual metaphor theory and explores its application to English vocabulary teaching in aspects of polysemy, idiom and collocation. By means of questionnaire filled out by a group of prospective English language teachers who have acquired basic knowledge of conceptual metaphor theory, the findings show that despite the advantages of combining conceptual metaphor and English vocabulary teaching, more than half of the subjects have never thought of it before. The subjects’unawareness hinders application and promotion of more effective vocabulary teaching tactics based on conceptual metaphor theory.