Application Of Conceptual Metaphor And Metonymy To Teaching Compounds In Oxford Advance With English

English vocabulary teaching has long been influenced by the structuralism represented by Saussure, who claims that there is no inherent connection between the forms and the meaning of most words. While Cognitive Lexicology holds that many semantic phenomena have cognitive motivations and they are not arbitrary. In Cognitive Lexicology, vocabulary organization, rules and usage in language are analyzed and studied from the perspective of cognition to help people acquire and grasp the deep knowledge of the vocabulary. In addition, based on empiricism, Cognitive Lexicology argues that the meaning of words is umbilically associated with human cognitive experience. Some scholars have applied its theories to vocabulary teaching. Most of their researches place more emphases_on the vocabulary teaching in college, while those place fewer emphases on the vocabulary teaching in senior high school.This thesis uses Conceptual Metaphor and Metonymy in Cognitive Lexicology to analyze English compounds in Oxford Advance with English, aiming at providing a brand-new perspective for English vocabulary teaching, improving its quality and making students acquire English vocabulary better. A survey was also used to investigate the current situation of senior high students’ vocabulary learning. Furthermore, a4-week teaching experiment was conducted among201students in Senior Two in a senior high school of Xuzhou. The results show that students still learn English vocabulary with the traditional methods, for example, they learn it by rote. This method has its disadvantages. For one thing, they remember vocabulary inefficiently. For another thing, it is easy for them to forget the meaning and rules of English vocabulary. Therefore, they look forward to more effective ways to remember vocabulary. Compared with traditional vocabulary teaching methods, cognitive approach to teaching vocabulary can make students better learn vocabulary.In the end, some specific measures are put forward for English vocabulary teaching: teachers will strengthen their professional quality, learn metaphor and metonymy and related cognitive theories that are beneficial to vocabulary teaching, and make researches into the relevant teaching cases; study the formation of words and relate them to the cognitive mechanisms from the perspective of cognition; and cultivate students’ cognitive competence in class and so forth.