A Study On The Application Of Conceptual Metaphor Theory To The English Vocabulary Teaching In The Senior High Schools

Phonetics, vocabulary and grammar are the three basic elements of English, andthe significance of lexical study is undoubtedly obvious. However, the vocabularyteaching had been ignored until the1970s, and from then on gradually became aheated topic in linguistics. But the traditional teaching methodology has manyproblems which only cares about the words memory strategies and methods ofindirect acquisition, while the memory strategies mainly rely on the learners’ instinctcompetence on studying the pronunciation, form and meaning of the words. Thetraditional methodology failed to find an effective way to explain the relationsbetween meanings of words especially for the polysemy, and how to understand thepolysemy. To solve this problem, the learners’ cognitive competence must be takeninto consideration, which also has been ignored too much. At present there are fewexperimental researches on using conceptual metaphors in English vocabularyteaching, and this thesis is of great importance for the conceptual metaphor study aswell as language teaching pedagogy.The earliest study of metaphor dates back to the book Poetics which was writtenby Aristotle. He defined it as a kind of rhetoric which means using the name of a thingto express another one. It not only refers to simile and metaphor in a Chinese way, butalso includes personification, synecdoche, metonymy, synaesthesia, euphemism andso on. In a word, the traditional metaphor theory takes metaphor as a deviation oflanguage, an ornament of language or a figure of speech. But cognitive linguisticsholds that metaphor is not only just a linguistic phenomenon, but also a method ofthought and reason. It is the main mechanism through which we comprehend abstractconcepts and things. The publication of the epoch-making classic Metaphor We LiveBy written by Lakoff and Johnson in1980, marked the real cognitive paradigmaticshift of metaphor research. The conceptual metaphor theory holds that metaphor ispervasive in everyday language as an instrument of cognition and people alwaysexplain and learn the abstract and complex things and concepts in terms of theconcrete and simple ones. According to the study of Lakoff and Johnson, language ismetaphoric and metaphorical expressions deeply penetrate in every level of language.Metaphor even becomes one way of word-formation and contributes to the semanticvariation and extension of words. The conceptual metaphor bears a close relationshipwith language learning, especially vocabulary learning. Currently, the application ofconceptual metaphor to vocabulary teaching mainly focuses on the college EFL learning. So the application of this theory in high school English teaching is in urgentneed.There are two questions studied in this thesis: first, whether students in seniorhigh will understand the meanings of polysemy and idioms more precisely on thebasis of conceptual metaphor theory? Second, can the application of conceptualmetaphor theory facilitate the understanding of English vocabualry culturalconnotation of senior high school students? In order to testify the two hypotheses, Imade an experiment in No.1Middle School of Qihe in Dezhou city. And before theexperiment, I first gave out questionnaires to check out the situation and mainproblems in vocabulary teaching and learning, which shows that most teachers stilluse the traditional ways in teaching English words and few teachers can understandand apply conceptual metaphor in vocabulary teaching. While the learners have a lowand inadequate word level as a result of their mechanical and inflexible methods ofword-study. They also failed to understand the natural meaning connection betweenwords and are confused about the semantic evolution of words. Before and afetr theexperiment, the author took pretests and posttests respectively to check the learners’vocabulary level, which showed the experimental class performed much better thanthe compared class.The thesis begins with the introduction of significance of words in languagelearning and the main problems we have in vocabulary teaching. That’s chapter one.Chapter two introduces the main research of conceptual metaphor abroad and home.Then points out the shortage of the study on vocabulary teaching under the guidanceof the conceptual metaphor. Chapter three introduces the definition, work mechanismand characteristics of conceptual metaphor and then gives a detailed introduction ofthe relationship between conceptual metaphor and vocabulary. Chapter four is aboutthe methodology: questionnaires and an experiment, as well as the main steps of theexperiment. Chapter five is about outcome analysis of the questionnaire and dataanalysis of the tests based on SPSS, which shows the experimental class performsmuch better than the compared class. Chapter five gives the main findings andsuggestion of this experiment. Chapter six gives a general result of this experimentand points out the limitations and short points of this study and the implications forthe future.