A Study Of The Application Of Conceptual Metaphor To Writing Teaching For English Majors

According to Lakoff and Johnson, metaphor is conceptual in nature, which marks the transformation of views on metaphor from an ornamental device to a cognitive mechanism. They claim that metaphor is pervasive in everyday life, not just in language but in thought and action. Our ordinary conceptual system, in terms of which we think and act, is fundamentally metaphorical in nature. Metaphor is a set of cross-domain mappings from the concrete source domain to the target domain, which is the working mechanism of metaphor. Pervasiveness, coherence and systematicity are the main features of conceptual metaphor proposed by many scholars.Judging from the features and working mechanism of conceptual metaphor, the thesis aims at applying Conceptual Metaphor to two aspects of English Writing Teaching:cultivating divergent thinking to the topic and overall arrangement at the discourse level, which includes coherence and cohesion, lexical resource, grammatical range and accuracy. The author designed this experiment with the hope of exploring the feasibility of conceptual metaphor to writing teaching for English majors. It is an empirical experiment carried out with the help of Lecturer Huang, who is also engaged in the field of cognitive linguistics, which contributes a lot to this study. Huang is in charge of the English writing course to his two intact parallel classes from the College of Foreign Study, Guangxi Normal University. The subjects are sophomores, majoring in English. According to the materials and courseware given by the author, Huang assists the author in conducting the experiment which lasts for eight weeks. Before the experiment, a short question survey and the pretest were carried out among the two classes in order to investigate students’writing preference and knowledge about metaphor. After that, students in two classes are required to take a pretest by writing a composition on the topic of "People Isolated From Each Other". Students should try to finish the composition in class without referring to dictionaries. Then, the experiment is carried out. The time schedule for the experiment class is as follows:In the first week students were led to the general idea of contemporary view of metaphor via definition explanation and some familiar examples. In the following six weeks, the conductor presents subjects with six conceptual metaphors so as to let students realize that metaphor is a cognitive tool instead of merely a rhetorical device. In the last week, students were directed to appreciate how conceptual metaphors were applied in the articles. After that, the subjects of the two classes were given posttests. In the posttest, students are assigned to finish the composition on the topic of "How to Be a Qualified Student". Posttest is carried out as soon as the experiment is finished.All the statistics are input into the computer and processed and analyzed by the statistic software R2.14.1for Windows in order to present some objective statistical evidences for the quantitative approach. The outcome of the study illustrates that total score made by the experiment class surpassed the control class. As for the task response item, the students in EC have made great progress. While for the cohesive and coherence item, just a little improvement has been made judging from the mean score. In the other two items, the progress in the two classes is not so obvious.On the basis of the empirical study, this paper comes to the following conclusions:(a) It is feasible to apply conceptual metaphor to EFL writing teaching. Students perform better in writing after learning conceptual metaphor and they have show high enthusiastic for acquiring this knowledge.(b) The implication of conceptual metaphors has a positive effect on students’ writing competence and it is of great significance to introduce conceptual metaphor in the prewriting stage.(c) Learning conceptual metaphor helps students improve their metaphor competence and produce the coherent and logical metaphorical expressions.This thesis is divided into six chapters. Chapter One is the introduction of research background, purpose and significance, and the layout of the thesis. Chapter Two deals with the literature review on the main studies in some relevant fields. Chapter Three is the theoretical foundation for the study. Chapter Four is about the research design and procedures for the experiment. Chapter Five, the data analysis and discussion, is the main body of the thesis. Chapter Six is the conclusion part, which presents the major findings of the study, explores the pedagogical implications, points out the limitations of the experiment and proposes some areas for further study.