The Application Of Conceptual Metaphor Theory To College English Vocabulary

Nowadays, Chinese schools have already regarded English teaching as the basicpart in China. Vocabulary teaching is the basis of English teaching. But the difficultyteachers and students face about student’s memory of the words is considered tobecome time-consuming and low efficiency in college. The teachers have manymethods such as word-building analysis, and context inference that students canunderstand and memorize words better. But our students don’t know lots of languagebackgrounds and language cultures. So the main problem of the students ismemorizing the vocabulary by rote.From the cognitive conceptual metaphor perspective, metaphor is both arhetorical in style and the important part. Metaphor is used in our everyday languagein our daily life, which plays an important role in the vocabulary teaching. So inlanguage acquisition, especially in vocabulary acquisition vocabulary learning isrelated to conceptual metaphor theories.The thesis tries to propose a teaching approach of vocabulary teaching formconceptual metaphor theory.This thesis introduces the metaphor of knowledge, which leads to knowledge ofthe concept of metaphor. Vocabulary teaching using by conceptual metaphor theoryresearch is at home and abroad. Next it introduces vocabulary teaching and therelationship between vocabulary teaching and conceptual metaphor theory. Thecentral issue in this theory is to discuss how metaphors establish mappings betweenconcepts from different domains. It tries to know whether conceptual metaphor theory can make vocabulary acquisition easier and develop students’metaphoricalcompetence.These freshmen who are Non-English major have the same proficiency level arechosen as subjects in this experiment. They are the experimental class and the controlclass.Two copies of teaching materials are two parts of the instrument. One is pretestpaper; the other is two posttest papers. Three months’empirical research started.The process is as followed: in order to make sure that the students from two classeshave the same proficiency level and the same metaphor competence, the authorcarries out the pretest. Then author still uses traditional method to teach the controlclass. Author uses conceptual theory to teach experimental class.During the data analyzing by SPSS and EXCEL, author can know the level ofvocabulary of the students in the experimental class is higher than the level ofvocabulary of the students in the control class and the students in the experimentalclass memorized vocabularies more effectively. In the terms of verbal phases thestudents improve the ability of vocabulary expansion; in the terms of the idioms andpolysemys the students have a long-term vocabulary memory and they also can arousetheir metaphorical competence.To sum up, the conceptual metaphor has a significant influence on thevocabulary teaching and learning.