Influence Of Metaphoric Competence Cultivation In Chinese College Non-English Major Students’ Vocabulary Learning

With the widespread appearance of the metaphor in multidimensional linguistics,metaphoric competence has been also gradually paid more attention than before. Moreresearches on metaphoric competence, especially some researches related with vocabularylearning, have been attracted by many scholars at home or aboard. Based on previousresearches, the study empirically discusses the relationship between metaphoriccompetence and vocabulary level in the process of second vocabulary acquisition, whichmakes teachers and students realize the importance of metaphoric competence cultivating,enhance the overlapping competence among various learning strategies and offer someimplements to English vocabulary teaching and learning.According to cognitive linguistics, metaphoric theory will be introduced into collegeEnglish vocabulary teaching process by means of combining the theory and experiment, soas to provide more data and methods for college vocabulary teaching to find out someplans on metaphoric competence cultivating. The main content of this study are as follows:(1) Before the experiment, what of the testee’s metaphoric competence and vocabulary levelseparately?(2) Is there any significant correlation between vocabulary level of Englishlearners and MC，either integrally or separately?(3) Through cultivating testees’ metaphoriccompetence, is their metaphoric competence enhanced or not? If any, does the vocabularylevel will be influenced by it?(4) After the cultivating of metaphoric competence, havetestees known some theories of MC and are there any changes in their vocabulary learningstrategies?The experiment was implemented for9weeks in two parallel classes, in which theywere students in the first grade from the Communications College of Shanxi NormalUniversity. By reference from Jiang Meng’s metaphoric competence test and Sehmitt’svocabulary level test, the author undertook both tests before and after the experiment and then through the data analysis from the software SPSS17.0, it can be observed whether therewas any difference between metaphoric competence and vocabulary level in the experimentalclass and the control class after an entire semester of cultivation. Besides, some testees will beinterviewed about vocabulary acquisition strategies, to verify whether metaphoric competencecan influence vocabulary strategies.The data analysis leads to some findings:(1) the testees’ metaphoric competence is in thelower level, which means the metaphoric competence of second language learners innon-English major can be improved;(2) the metaphoric competence can be enhanced, nomatter in the whole or separately;(3) there is a significant relationship between cultivation ofmetaphoric competence and vocabulary level, leading to the positive influence;(4) there aresome positive influence on other strategies caused by the metaphoric cultivation to vocabularyacquisition.In this thesis, the feasibility and necessity of cultivating metaphoric competence isverified. Some implications are also expounded for the teaching and learning of secondvocabulary: teachers should pay attention to students’ cultivation of metaphoric competenceand encourage students to acquire vocabulary by cognitive methods; students should make themost of metaphoric theories in the learning strategies and acquire vocabulary effectively. Onthe whole, the application of metaphoric theories will provide a new path for the Englishlearning.