The Application Of Conceptual Metaphor To English Vocabulary Teaching In Senior High School

Phonetics, lexical and grammar are the three elements of English, while theimportance of lexical study is very obvious. However, the vocabulary teaching hasbeen ignored until 1970s, and from then on gradually become a hot point in linguistics.But the Traditional Teaching Methodology still has many problems which only careabout the words memory strategies and methods of words indirect acquisition, whilethe memory strategies mainly rely on the learners’instinct competence on studyingthe phonetic, form and meaning of the words. It failed to find an effective way toexplain the relations between words meaning especially for the polysemy, and how tounderstand them. In solving this problem, the learner’s cognitive competence must beconsidered, which also has been ignored too much. At present there are seldomexperimental researches by using conceptual metaphors in English words teaching, sohere this thesis has a great importance for the conceptual metaphor study as well aslanguage teaching pedagogy.The earliest study of metaphor can go back to the book“poetics”which waswritten by Aristotle. He defined it as a kind of rhetoric which means using the nameof a thing to express another one. It not only refers to simile and metaphor in Chineseway, but also can be personification, synecdoche, metonymy, synaesthesia，Euphemism and so on. In a word, the traditional metaphor theory takes metaphor as adeviation of language, an ornament of language or a figure of speech. But cognitivelinguistics holds that metaphor is not only just a linguistic phenomenon, but is methodof thought and reason. It is the main mechanism through which we comprehendabstract concepts and things. The publication of the epoch–making classic MetaphorWe Live By, written by Lakoff and Johnson in 1980, marked the real cognitive paradigmatic shift of metaphor research. The conceptual metaphor theory holds thatmetaphor is pervasive in everyday language and an instrument of cognition, in whichpeople always explain and learn the abstract and complex things and concepts interms of the concrete and simple ones. According to the study of Lakoff and Johnson,man’s language is metaphoric and deep penetrated in every level of it. Metaphor evenbecomes one way of word-formation and development of word meaning. The conceptmetaphor bears a close relationship with language learning, especially vocabularylearning. While by far the application of conceptual metaphor in vocabulary teachingmainly focus on the college EFL. So the application of this theory on high schoolwords learning is greatly needed.There are two questions studied in this thesis: first, the possibility of theapplication of conceptual metaphor to senior high school English words teaching.Second, if the methods of using conceptual metaphor to guide words teaching canimprove the students’words level more effectively. In order to testify the twohypotheses, I made an experiment in Yishui first senior high school in linyi city. Andbefore the experiment, I first gave out questionnaires to check out the situation andmain problems in language words teaching and learning, which showed that mostteachers still used the traditional ways in teaching English words and few teachers canunderstand and apply conceptual metaphor in words teaching. While the learners havea low and inadequate word level as a result of their mechanical and inflexible methodsof word-study. They also failed to understand the nature meaning connection betweenwords and are confused about the meaning changes of words, etc. while in this longexperiment, we take a pretest and posttest to check the learners vocabulary level,which showed the experimental class performed much better than the compared class.But frankly speaking, this experiment still has many limitations.This thesis begins with the introduction of importance of words in language learning and the main problems we have in words teaching. Chapter one introducesthe main research of conceptual metaphor abroad and at home. Then point outshortage of experiment study of this theory in high school English words teaching.Chapter two introduces the definition, work mechanism and characteristics ofconceptual metaphor and then gives a detail introduction of the relationship betweenconceptual metaphor and words, from which the conceptual metaphor approach isbuilt up. Chapter three is about the methodology: questionnaire and experiment, aswell as the main steps of the experiment. Chapter four is about outcome analysis ofthe questionnaire and data analysis of the tests based on SPSS, which showed theexperimental class performs much better than the compared class. Chapter five givesthe main findings and suggestion of this experiment. Last part gives a general result ofthis experiment and points out the limitations and short points of this study and thereasons for them.