An Experimental Study On The Effect Of Conceptual Metaphor Instruction On Senior High School Students’ Writing

Writing is one of the four skills in English learning. Many scholars and teachers havedone research on high school students English writing in order to improve their writingability by improving their verbal fluency. However, many high school students do not dowell in English writing as they pay great attention to grammar and vocabulary, and oftentranslate Chinese into English on the basis of Chinese manner, which leads tononnative-likeness and singleness in structures and expressions. Metaphorical competenceis an indispensable part in second language acquisition and appropriate use of metaphoricalexpressions helps enrich students writing. Based on the conceptual metaphor theoryproposed by Lakoff, Johnson and other cognitive linguists, this empirical study attempts toenhance the English writing proficiency of senior high school students by guiding them toincrease metaphorical density and the accuracy and diversity of sentence structures.To testify the effect of applying conceptual metaphor theory on English writingteaching to high school students，a12-week experiment was carried out in two classes fromShiqi No.3High School, Grade10, in Panyu District, Guangzhou. The teaching ofconceptual metaphor was provided in the experimental class (N=49) while the normalmethod was taught in the control class (N=49). The metaphorical density and diversity aswell as the writing performance of the participants were examined. The collected data wereanalyzed by Excel and SPSS. The results show:(1) Teaching conceptual metaphor has apositive effect in improving the metaphorical density and the diversity of Englishexpressions in senior high school students writing;(2) Teaching conceptual metaphor canimprove students writing performance.The findings of this study suggest that it is feasible to apply conceptual metaphor in theteaching of English writing in high schools. Providing students with opportunities oflearning conceptual metaphor is helpful for students to express diversely in English, finedown their choices of words and eventually, improve their writing performance.