One Study On The Non-english Major Students’ Discourse Understanding Based On The Metaphorical Cognition

Metaphor, a common language phenom enon, has more than two thousands years’ history of study. The earliest study can be dated back to the study of Aristotle. The study on metaphor never stops. Metaphor, in traditional studies, is taken as a figure speech. While in late 1970 s, so me linguists and philosophers rethink metaphor from Cognitive Linguistics perspective. They began to em phasize the vital function and universality in language. The new theory perspective and endless research methodology attracted the attention of specialists and linguists from different study areas. The study on m etaphor expended from lexical level and gramm ar level to discourse level. The factor of metaphorical cognition is less involved in the studies which investigate the factors that influence discourse understanding. Of course, there are le ss studies on second language acquisition learners. The previou s studies on metaphor also have few s tudies on th e relationship between metaphorical cognition and discourse understanding. However, in second language acquisition process, discourse understanding is an im portant part for learners. Students can come across many metaphors in reading understanding.Therefore, the atten tion of this pape r is p aid to the relationship between metaphorical cognition and reading understanding. It also attem pts to investigate the current situation of m etaphorical cognition competence and the relationship between metaphorical cognition competence and reading understanding. The final purpose is to increase students’ reading understanding competence.Documentation method, investigation, com parative method and interview have been used in this paper. This paper, under the basis of review of previous studies, used Littlemore’s questionnaire(2001), Azum a’s questionnaire(2005) and reading comprehension of CET to i nvestigate and test f or the selected 60 non-English m ajor students. Next, this study proves the result of questionn aire and test with SPSS22.0 and Spearman. The result indicates that non-English major students have lower metaphorical cognition com petence and lowe r metaphorical awareness and there is correlation between m etaphorical cognition and reading u nderstanding. Then wr iter discussed the result and put forward the strategies of cultivation of students’ metaphorical cognition com petence. The cu ltivation is from lexical, gramm ar and discourse three levels. This study hopes to gi ve a new pe rspective for future study in theory. in teaching process th is theory hopes to motivate st udents’ interest and develop their metaphorical cognition competence so as to promote the reading understanding. At the same time, there are some shortcomings. Due to the fact that the writer is not a real teacher and haven’t teaching experience, th e theory and s trategies weren’t put in to practice. So writer hope it will come true in the future.