An Empirical Study On Grammatical Metaphor In Teaching Writing For College English Major

English writing is a comprehensive output course in English major; it not only investigates students’vocabulary, grammar and the ability to construct a text, but also reflects their thinking abilities. The English majors always use tedious expressions by repeated and easy sentences or long sentences with a couple of clauses lacking coherence and cohesion in solid Chinese thinking mode under the influence of their mother language even though they can make complete and correct sentences with proper English words and grammar after they take the traditional writing course. Even though they have learned the designation of the layout of an article, what they write sometimes is modeling with nothing original. GM theory proposed by Halliday provides a new way to break the bottleneck in English writing and a new method to the teaching of English writing.This thesis elaborates the emergence and the development of grammatical metaphor as well as its current situation and the trend of its development both abroad and at home. The thesis, based on current English writing situation in university for English majors, conducts an empirical study guided by GM theory. With practical teaching as well as the quantitative analysis and qualitative analysis of GM in the writing of the students, the empirical study aims to reveal the following questions:1) Whether the teaching of GM theory increases students’consciousness of nominalization to better their English thinking mode.2) Whether the quantity of GM in the writing changes and whether the application is proper and correct.3) Whether students’writing is more readable by application of GM so that their writing level is enhanced in a new way.The empirical study is conducted for 76 second-year English majors in the Northeast Forestry University for six weeks in twelve periods. It takes the methods of quantitative analysis and qualitative analysis through the data and samples from pre-test and post-test in the control group and experiment group. Besides, questionnaire and interview are both the ways to analyze and reflect the effects on students’ writing. The analysis on the data, the language materials and the interviews answers the questions above, which indicates that students’ awareness of nominalization has been enhanced through the input of GM theory and the correspondence writing practice, so their English thinking mode has been improved during writing. The study has found that through the sample analysis the application of GM for the students has enhanced on different levels but it is not satisfactory, for some of the students have not get rid of the writing format lacking creativity though most metaphors they use are reasonable and make the articles more readable. Meanwhile, there are still such problems as time limitation, small number of study participants, shallow understanding of the theory etc. In order to do a better and more profound study, the author gives some advice to the further study in the future, wishing to do more contribution in English teaching.