Analysis And Solutions On High School Students’ Metaphorical Competence

Metaphor is generally accepted as a means of cognition, a way of thinking andacting, and even an indispensable tool which promotes the development of a language.It is undeniable that language cannot be seperated from human cognition; thus therelationship between English teaching and metaphor is close and deep. The followingtwo questions are adressed in this thesis:(1)What is the present situation of highschool students’ metaphorical comptence?(2)Whether does metaphorical comptenceinfluence high school students’ reading proficiency and how does metaphoricalcompetence influence students’ reading proficiency? Questionnaire and testing papersare employed to survey and test the metaphorical comptence and reading proficiencyof the students in No.3Middle School of Zhangzhou. Questionnaire and the first testwere conducted before the teaching experience to survey the situation of metaphoricalcompetence of high school students, and the second test was conducted to check themetaphorical competence of high school students after the teaching experience of asemester. SPSS17.0is employed to analyse all the data of the questionnaire and thetest papers. There are some basic ways which teachers can employ to improvestudents’ metaphorical consciousness during the teaching process of English reading,such as initiating students into materials that contain metaphorical expressions,explaining cultural meanings of metaphors in reading meterials and guiding studentsto form the habit of collecting metaphorical expressions. By the end of the experienceof introducing metaphorical theories to high school English teaching, the followingconclusion can be reached: metaphorical competence can do students a great favor toobtain the metaphorical meanings in a passage more easily and teachers should makeefforts to strengthen their metaphorical competence in the progress of English readingteaching in high school.