A Study Of Effects Of Metaphoric Thinking On English Writing Of University Non-english Majors

Writing is an essential content in English learning for all Chinese language learners andit is a reflection of their comprehensive ability in English learning. However, writing is notjust the application of words and grammars, but also a matter of processing materials. In otherwords, writing thought plays a significant role in discourse creation, which tells learners whatto write and how to write but it is usually neglected by most English teachers who just putmuch stress on grammars in discourse creation. Therefore, an effective writing instruction isbadly needed to help students to enhance their writings. Metaphoric thinking should be one ofthe figurative writing thoughts, which is believed to be efficient to arouse English learners’metaphoric competence (the ability to recognize, interpret and produce metaphors) by asystematic training. And lots of studies and researches in and abroad have demonstrated theimportance of training metaphoric thinking in language teaching and learning. In order toprove that metaphoric teaching and learning is very important for Chinese universitynon-English majors’ English discourse creation, this research, based on metaphor theoriesincluding the rhetoric and cognitive perspectives, tries to answer the following questions.1)What’s the state of metaphoric teaching in this university?2) What’s the state of thenon-English majors’ metaphoric competence?3) Will the students’ metaphoric competenceget improved by a systematic training on metaphoric thinking?4) Will the training onmetaphoric thinking have a positive effect on students’ English discourse production? At first,in order to learn the current situation of metaphoric teaching, the author conducted aninterview among the English teachers. Besides, two interviews were held before theexperiment and after the experiment respectively among the students to learn their Englishwriting situation and their attitude to metaphoric teaching.For the experiment, a Control Group and an Experimental Group with similarproficiency in English were chosen randomly to participate in the research. And the twogroups underwent different teaching contents that last one term. That is to say,reading-to-writing method was adopted in both groups while in EG, metaphor contents wereadded and the writing course developed under the guidance of metaphoric thinking. Besides,the two groups received6tests on metaphor respectively, three pretests to conduct if the students’ metaphoric competence is at similar level and three posttests to justify theeffectiveness of the training. All the data were collected and analyzed with the software SPSS19.0. The analysis predicts the success of the experiment and the students in EG indeed hadsurpassed those in CG both in metaphoric competence and discourse writing.On the basis of data analysis and qualitative discussion, the major findings are asfollows.1) Metaphor knowledge is neglected by almost all the English teachers;2) Thenon-English majors’ metaphoric competence stays at a low level;3) A systematic training onmetaphoric thinking does arouses students’ potential level of metaphoric competence;4)Much exposure to metaphors contributes to students’ English learning and discourse writing.In the end, some suggestions are brought out, which say that university students’metaphoric competence should be improved by a systematic leaning and metaphor teachingand learning should be applied into all the English subjects such as reading.