Study On The Relationoship Between Metaphoric Competence And Idioms Comprehension Ablity Of Non-English Major Students

Since the late1970s, linguists and philosophers in Europe and the United States began to study "metaphor" which was traditionally seen as a kind of figure of speech from cognitive perspective. They emphasized the importance as well as universality of metaphor in language. This fresh angle of view and various research methods in no time attracted the experts and scholars from various subjects.Cognitive linguistics believes that language is systematically constructed and developed during the process of human beings’ perception, experiencing and functioning in the outside world, and metaphor, is not only a figure of speech in the traditional sense, parasitic on language, but also is regarded as a means of people’s perceptibility and experience in the external world, a way of thought and life. Metaphor is a cognitive tool and is conceptual in nature. Based on these, subsequent cognitive metaphor theories and practices point out that the ability to acquire, produce, and interpret metaphors in the target language is vital to language learning. Gardner and Winner (1978) call it metaphoric competence (MC), a term analogous to Chomsky’s linguistic competence and Hymes(1972)’communicative competence, now attracting more and more attention from language researchers. Therefore, metaphoric competence is a new subject that needs to be focused on and at the same time, higher requirements are demanded.The author read and summarized the previous documents and studies done by the predecessors, finding that, no approach has been come up with to emphasize the cultivation of metaphoric competence. Besides, the test methods to assess students’metaphoric competence are still under much controversy even though there were some trials from different research angles. For the relevant study of the ability of English idioms comprehension and metaphoric competence is also scanty. At home, although linguists and scholars have already recognized the indispensable role that metaphoric competence plays in language learning, the empirical study about metaphoric competence is comparatively later and weaker.The main part of the thesis is the research conducted with a purpose to evaluate the status quo of the metaphoric competence of non-English major students and based on this to infer the present level of Chinese college students’metaphoric competence. Besides, through the idiom tests, the author aims to find out the relationship between students’ metaphoric competence and English idiom comprehension ability.To be more specifically, the thesis is mainly to find answers to the following three questions:1) What’s the general status quo of the non-English major students’ metaphoric competence and idiom comprehension ability?2) Whether the English proficiency of non-English major students is rational to their metaphorical competence in English?3) Is there any relationship existing between students’metaphoric competence and the ability of English idioms comprehension?There were198subjects in the research, who are all non-English major freshmen. Random sampling was used to select90subjects to analyze. The scores of Placement test of Beijing college students was taken as a measurement of their English proficiency, MCT by Jeanette Littlemore (2001) was used to test the subjects’metaphoric competence, and the idiom tests were applied to measure subjects’ability of English idioms comprehension. All the data were collected and put into computer for statistical analysis. The software utilized to process the data was the SPSS19.0.Based on the data collected, the author has had a general conclusion on the research questions and the major findings of the paper which could be summarized as follows:1) The scores and results of the subjects in the MC test manifest that general metaphoric competence is in a medium level, which indicates that metaphoric competence of the Chinese EFL students has not had a sufficient development.2) In terms of the relationship between metaphoric competence and English proficiency level, the data discussed display that they are highly positively correlated, which may further suggest that the students’level of metaphoric competence could presumably vary along with their English proficiency. It at the same time provides theoretical basis for the teaching model which brings in the metaphoric competence training.3) The subjects’ability of English idioms comprehension and their metaphoric competence are significantly correlated. However, for the low-level group, the two are not closely related. Through repeated analysis, the author thinks that the big differences between western culture and eastern culture are the objective causes, which might include: differences in lifestyles, geographic environment, religious belief and mythology.Last, from the pedagogical perspective, the author put forward some approaches and methods for the teachers in cultivating metaphor as reference. In the English classes, teachers need to combine the metaphor theory and traditional teaching methods together, especially focus on the metaphorical English idioms, to strengthen students’ metaphoric competence. Based on the improvement of their metaphoric competence, it could help the students to apply metaphoric cognitive strategy and metaphoric thinking to their metaphoric comprehension, so that they could improve the learning efficiency and finally enhance the ability of English learning and application.