A Tentative Study Of Teaching Culturally-loaded Vocabulary In College English Teaching—from The Perspective Of Conceptual Metaphor Theory

As the smallest union of pronunciation and meaning that can be used independently, vocabulary not only forms the basic unit of any language, but also carries the most cultural factors in a language. Generally speaking, vocabulary embodies the certain geographical, social and ideological features of a nation. However, the relationships between culture and vocabulary, and cultural connotations of vocabulary have long been ignored in college English teaching. It results in students’poor knowledge of target culture and their superficial understanding of words’meanings. On the one hand, influenced by grammar-translation method, teachers tend to use the traditional way of teaching vocabulary-pronunciation, form and meaning, which pays little regards to cross-cultural context and pragmatic consideration; on the other hand, English as foreign language learners always take great efforts to memorize new vocabulary, only to find their vocabulary is still limited and the usage of vocabulary is still unfamiliar to them.While in cognitive linguistics, metaphor is reconsidered not as the rhetoric device, but a conceptual and experiential process that structures our mind and language. The conceptual metaphor theory offers us a new perspective to the studies in vocabulary acquisition. It holds that the meaning of word is not inherent and unchanging; what’s more it is different from people’s cognitive association in different discourses. Metaphor can be transmitted by means of language-the most important cultural carrier, and is reflected, in the form of language. The cultural connotations of words are based on metaphorical thinking and the association of conceptual metaphor.In this regard, the thesis tries to analyze metaphorical cognition of certain culturally-loaded words, i.e. animal metaphors, in the framework of conceptual metaphor theory, and puts forward some pedagogical suggestions for teachers in the hope that it will bring some positive influence; then makes an attempt to apply conceptual metaphor theory to college English vocabulary teaching with an experimental study. During teaching process, by imparting metaphorical thinking to students, teachers lead them to better understand target language culture and utilize culturally-loaded vocabulary. In order to testify the feasibility and effectiveness of such approach, the paper conducted a twelve-week teaching experiment and adopted questionnaire and test papers to collect the data. After the experiment, the data was analyzed by SPSS; it found out that the hypotheses have been certified with the statistics. That is to say, the application of conceptual metaphor theory to English culturally-loaded vocabulary teaching is feasible and valid; and it can facilitate students’ proficiency in learning and using culturally-loaded vocabulary, and motivate students to familiarize with target culture actively.At last, the paper summarizes the major findings of the study; at the same time, points out several shortcomings in this paper and the prospection for future studies.