A Study Of The Improvement Of Students’ Reading Ability Through Text Coherence From Conceptual Metaphor

Metaphor is pervasive in our everyday life. Its development has gone through a long history. And nowadays, more and more scholars pay attention to metaphor study and lots of achievements have been got. From language ornamental device to semantic change, from the meaning none natural to cognitive mechanism, people have gradually come to the essential characters of metaphor beneath the surface of linguistic language expressions. During this process, researching approaches from other academic fields like philosophy, semantics, pragmatics, psychology and cognitive science have been adopted into the study of metaphor, which helps people reaching closer and closer to the essence of metaphor that is covered by language expressions. Metaphor, in the essence, is a kind of thinking way and a cognitive process.Aristotle is the first giant to study metaphor. However, Lakoff and Johnson began a new era of metaphor studying with the publication of "Metaphors we live by". They explore metaphor from cognitive perspective and put forward conceptual metaphor theory. In terms of nature, metaphor is not linguistic, but fundamentally conceptual. Metaphors are not just a way of expressing ideas by means of language, but a way of thinking about things. In terms of structure, metaphor is a mapping across conceptual domains. Such mappings are one-directional in that they only involve projections from a source domain to a target domain, not the other way round.On the basis of the previous research, this paper aims to investigate the function of text coherence of conceptual metaphor in reading comprehension. As text coherence can be kept by conceptual metaphor, mastering conceptual metaphor con foster students’ reading ability. Based on conceptual metaphor theory and text coherence theory, the paper studies whether conceptual metaphor can improve students’reading comprehension and how conceptual metaphor promote it. I choose two classes from Dalian Women’s Professional Technical Secondary School to identify whether conceptual metaphor can improve students’ reading comprehension.This study plays an important part in studying and researching. Students’ reading ability can improve by learning conceptual metaphor, and their English level can also improve. This thesis is on the basis of the former studies and devotes a little to the development of conceptual metaphor and text coherence. Thus conceptual metaphor can develop further.