An Empirical Exploration Of The Relationship Between Chinese EFL Learners’ Domain Mapping Ability And Writing Ability

Language competence has always been the focus of the linguistic study. Sincemany linguists have proposed their theories about language competence, such asSaussure’s “langue"and “parole", Chomsky’s “performance"and “competence", andBachman’s communicative competence mode, some researchers proposed theconcept of “conceptual competence".As for the study of conceptual competence, there are few researches havestepped on this field. Danesi’s conceptual fluency theory put the concepts on a quiteimportant role and he even proposed that metaphorical competence is equal to theconceptual fluency. However Kecskes doubt this and proposed his own theory ofconceputal competence that people own language processing device(LPD) andcommon underlying conceptual base(CUCB) which make people competent inlanguage. In all, few researchers give a detailed definition until Jiang Meng proposedhis conceptual competence model and explain the process of conceptulization whichis the mental process whereby experiences are made sense of and transformed intoverbally-encodable concetpual structures through such mental opertations as domainmapping, perspective taking, schematization and categorization. Few researchersstudy on the relationship between the writing ability and the conceptual ability.Bearing this background，the author aims to investigate the correlationshipbetween the sub ability of conceptual competence——domain mapping ability andwriting ability of Chinese EFL learners, and also the developmental characteristics ofthe three sub types of domain mapping ability, schema mapping ability, metaphoricalability and metonymic ability. In this case，90writings from three writing-levels ofWECCL are used and the domain mapping ability is tested by the counts on thephrases of three sub types of domanin mapping ability. The collected data isanalyzed by SPSS.The statistics of the study indicate, first, all the levels of Chinese EFL learners’schema mapping ability is better than metaphorical mapping ability and metonymicmapping ability. Second, the three sub types of domain mapping ability are allpositively correlated with the writing ability. Third, the three sub types of domainmapping ability improve as the writing ability improves, the schema mapping ability develops well in the mid writing-level and improve a little in the high writing-level.Though the metaphorical mapping ability and metonymic mapping abiltiydevelopworse than schema mapping ability, the stability can be seen in these twoabilities.These research findings bear significant pedagogic implications for Englishwriting teaching. It can help the teachers and students better understand thecharacteristcs of high-level writing abiltiy. And this research method can be appliedto the research on other sub ablity of conceptual competence.