A Study Of Improving Students’ English Writing Ability Through Applying Conceptual Metaphor

Metaphor, at the beginning, was viewed as a kind of figure of speech. People think that it just plays a role of ornament. Apart from this, it is important. In these two decades, lots of scholars began to study metaphor from cognitive perspective. At this time, metaphor is not just a kind of rhetorical device, but also a thinking way and a cognitive process, which affects human’s thought and idea system. Metaphor is the basis of thinking, even of the action. This basis dated back to Metaphors We Live By published in1980s by Lakeoff and Johnson. In this book, they think "conceptual metaphor is the basis of cognition, thinking, experience, language and action of human beings, and the way of life we can’t live without."Being the indispensable constitution of language, conceptual metaphor also provides the great possibility for writing teaching with the new sights. In the process of writing, the students’outputs are usually according to the Chinese way and they conceptualize their experience which is expressed by them and it will result in the unidiomatic sentences in English writing. If the conceptual metaphor of cognitive linguistics is introduced into English teaching, making the students perceive and understand the nature of conceptual metaphor at its most fundament. It will make great influence on their writing.The researcher aims to study the use of conceptual metaphor in English writing, identify conceptual metaphor is a mark of grasping a kind of language fluently and reflect the conceptual metaphor in English writing. This thesis begins from conceptual metaphor theory, analyze the categories and characteristics of conceptual metaphor and be able to pay attention to the development of students’metaphor thinking and metaphor competence, so that the students can apply the coherence function of conceptual metaphor to English writing and students’compositions more coherent and easier to understand. However, this development is through letting the students know how target language construct concept based on conceptual metaphor structure and I will identify it through experiment. I design an English teaching class experiment, which lasts for3months.In this experiment, I divide the students into the control group and the experiment group and apply different teaching ways on these two groups to illustrate there is some relationship between metaphor competence and writing ability. Therefore, in English teaching, English teachers should pay more attention to the development of metaphor competence so that students’writing ability can be improved.