Research Into The Effect Of Chinse Culture On The Senior High School EFL Learners’ Comprehension Of English Metaphors

The study of metaphor has a history of2000years, and2000years ago Aristotle startedthe metaphor study. For a long time, metaphor is simply regarded as a figure of speech.However, the studies in the recent years have been giving more and more attention to thecognitive nature of metaphor. Especially, Lakoff and Johnson initiated the metaphor study onthe cognition dimension. They pointed out that metaphor could be found almost in everycorner of people’s life. That means that metaphor is a way for people to understand the world.Based on the agreement with a cognitive view on metaphor, the author studied thecomprehension process of metaphors.As to the comprehension process of English metaphors, the author hypothesizes that thesenior high school EFL learners are constrained by the native Chinese culture. On the basis ofthe contents the author set, four cognitive aspects are taken into account for the research,which include metaphorical concepts, image schemas, related knowledge and psychologicalassociation. Seeing from the above four aspects, the following two questions are veryimportant to the recent study:(1) Discussing from the four cognitive aspects, how the nativeChinese culture affects the senior high school EFL learners’ metaphor comprehension?(2)What implications can we get for senior high school EFL teaching and learning?So the author took one hundred and four senior high school students in Ganzhou Middle1School as the subjects. The test was carried out in the first half year of the third gradestudents in2012. The reason why I chose that time was that they had less pressure than thelatter half year and the third grade students had more knowledge about English. After theserious analysis of the data from the ninety eight valid answers to the seven Englishcultural-specific and five English cultural-sharing items, it is shown that the learners have abigger percentage of correct answers for the cultural-sharing items but more errors are madefor the cultural-specific ones. It is indicated that the Chinese EFL learners tend to apply theimage schemas, metaphorical concepts, related knowledge and psychological associationunder the Chinese culture background to interpret the items.