An Empirical Study On The Application Of Conceptual Metaphor Theory To The English Vocabulary Teaching In Senior High School

Phonetics, vocabulary and grammar are the three elements of English, and theimportance of vocabulary learning is very obvious. Recent years, scholars in China andabroad have constantly studied English vocabulary teaching from different aspects. While,until1980s, Lakoff and Johnson published a book named Metaphors We Live By, in whichthey put forward Conceptual Metaphor Theory that marked the real beginning of metaphorresearch. Lakoff and Johnson thought that metaphor is pervasive in everyday life,consisting in language, mind and action, and it is a cognitive phenomenon of human beings;the core of Conceptual Metaphor Theory is that it is a cognitive mapping mechanism ofhuman from one specific domain to the abstract one. From then on, some scholars havebegun to apply Conceptual Metaphor Theory to English vocabulary teaching, and madegreat progress. But, the researches on the application of Conceptual Metaphor Theory intoEnglish vocabulary teaching by experts always concentrate on vocational colleges anduniversities, rarely on the basic education. Therefore, through the quantitative analysis, theauthor wants to study the effect of applying Conceptual Metaphor Theory to Englishvocabulary teaching in senior high school. Here are the two research questions as follows:whether the application of Conceptual Metaphor Theory can improve students’ Englishvocabulary proficiency in senior high school more effectively than the traditional teachingmethod, and the students in EC can take a positive attitude to the vocabulary teachingbased on Conceptual Metaphor Theory or not.Two classes are chosen from Grade One of Haicheng Senior High School. And thereare52students in the two class, in which one is the experimental class, the other is thecontrolled class. The students are taught by the same teacher with the same teachingmaterials named Compulsory One and Compulsory Two. The experimental class is taughtwith the vocabulary teaching based on Conceptual Metaphor Theory, while the controlledone is taught with the traditional teaching method. The period of this experiment is18weeks, and the author scientifically analyzes the statistics of the questionnaire from EC andin the meantime, by the means of statistics software SPSS11.5, the author also analyzes thestatistics from EC and CC in the pre-test and the post-test. In the pre-test, the sig for eachclass is0.993which is higher than0.05; that shows there is no clear difference betweentwo classes. But in the post-test, the sig for EC is0.000which is lower than0.05while thatfor CC is obviously higher than0.05. The results show that the application of ConceptualMetaphor Theory can improve students’ English vocabulary proficiency in senior high school more effectively than the traditional teaching method. In addtion, the statistics fromQI shows the students’ performance in vocabulary is so weak that they begin to have apassive attitude to the vocabulary learning. And the statistics from QII shows the studentsin EC take a positive attitude to the vocabulary teaching based on Conceptual MetaphorTheory.