A Study On The Application Of Conceptual Metaphor To Senior High School English Vocabulary Teaching

Vocabulary, one of the basic elements of language, plays a decisive role inlanguage teaching. For many years, experts and scholars at home and abroad have beenstudying English vocabulary teaching from different perspectives and have made greatachievements in this field. In the recent decades of years, some scholars tend to studyvocabulary teaching from the cognitive perspective and try to apply one of cognitivelinguistics theories, conceptual metaphor, to English vocabulary teaching, which hasgiven rise to some heartening fruits. Conceptual metaphor，as a bond of language, actsan important part in vocabulary teaching and is of great significance to students’vocabulary learning and understanding. However, having consulted the relevantliterature, the author found that most researches on the application of conceptualmetaphor to vocabulary teaching were based on the college level and rarely associatedwith the secondary school field. The author, engaged in English teaching in senior highschool for many years, found that senior high school English teachers paid very littleattention to the value and function of conceptual metaphor in vocabulary teaching, letalone put such a vocabulary teaching method into practice.Given the above issues and the current status, this thesis would like to make anempirical study to explore whether the application of conceptual metaphor tovocabulary teaching can facilitate English vocabulary learning of senior high schoolstudents, with a view to give certain implications to senior high school Englishvocabulary teaching. To be more specific, the following two research questions are putforward in this thesis:1) Can the application of conceptual metaphor facilitate English vocabularymemorization of senior high school students?2) Can the application of conceptual metaphor facilitate the understanding ofEnglish vocabulary cultural connotation of senior high school students?First, the thesis makes a review of the studies on vocabulary teaching, metaphorstudy and the studies on conceptual metaphor and vocabulary teaching both abroad and at home. Secondly, it expatiates on the definition, the working mechanism and theclassification of conceptual metaphor, analyses its theoretical application to vocabularyteaching. And then, an empirical study which lasts eight weeks is conducted. Twoclasses with similar English level in a common senior high school are chosen toparticipate in the study. One is an experimental class and the other is a controlled class.In the whole procedure of teaching, the same words are taught, but differentapproaches are adopted. In the EC (the experimental class), conceptual metaphor isapplied into vocabulary teaching, but in the CC (the controlled class）the traditionalvocabulary teaching is still carried out without the instructions of conceptual metaphor.The empirical study consists of two pre-tests, a series of classroom teachingexperiments, two post-tests and a questionnaire. Pre-test1is to ensure Englishvocabulary proficiency of the two classes, especially in metaphorical vocabulary, is notsignificantly different; pre-test2is to ensure the understanding level of Englishvocabulary cultural connotation of the both classes is not quite distinct. Two post-testsare conducted immediately in each class after the teaching experiments. After the tests,with the help of SPSS17.0, the experimental data are analyzed. The results in post-test1answer the first question: the application of conceptual metaphor can facilitateEnglish vocabulary memorization of senior high school students. The results inpost-test2answer the second question: the application of conceptual metaphor canfacilitate the understanding of English vocabulary cultural connotation of senior highschool students. The results of the questionnaire from the two classes further confirmthat the application of conceptual metaphor to vocabulary teaching can facilitateEnglish vocabulary learning of senior high school students and it is really an effectivemethod of vocabulary teaching.Finally, the major findings are presented and some pedagogical implications andsuggestions for further study are put forward. Meanwhile, the limitations of this studyare pointed out one by one.