A Study Of Meaning Construction In English Reading Comprehension Of Senior Middle School On Conceptual Blending Theory

Reading plays a significant role in English learning, and it is an important wayto cultivate student’s English competence. However, as for the student’s learning insenior middle school, the existing problems mainly lie in the following aspects: poorcomprehension ability, low speed and scores. As for the teacher’s teaching, thetraditional teaching methods ignored the cognitive activities of language use and themeaning construction in reading. Recently, conceptual blending theory initiated byFauconnier provides a scientific framework for the research on a range of cognitivephenomena behind language use.This thesis focuses on the cognitive and psychological process readers undergoin their reading process, which can be regarded as a process in which readers try toget information encoded in the reading discourse by decoding, processing,reconstructing and blending linguistic and semiotic information obtained throughvisual input. After the study on basic notions of conceptual blending theory andrelated theoretical problems concerning reading, it discovers that as the discoursefolds readers constantly establish and blend mental spaces to accomplish the processof meaning construction in reading comprehension.The research design is divided into two parts: questionnaires and theexperiment. The participants are Grade Two students from two classes with the sameor almost the same level in Shenyang No.120 Senior Middle School. Questionnaire isdesigned to demonstrate the necessity to introduce a new method in the process of reading comprehension. Against the problems found in the questionnaires, the newmethod of conceptual blending theory on meaning construction is taught to thestudents of experimental class in detail. The result compared to the control class canprove the effectiveness of this method to improve students’scores of readingcomprehension.By analyzing the application of blending on the discourse level and sentencelevel, the author points out that teacher should pay more attention on the cultivation ofstudents’cognitive mechanism of application the conceptual blending theory inreading comprehension, in order to improve the accuracy of students’comprehensionon meaning construction effectively. Furthermore, it can achieve the aims thatimproving the students’reading proficiency and their English level.