The Application Of Conceptual Metaphor Theory To Senior High School English Vocabulary Teaching

Vocabulary plays an important role in language teaching. For years, experts andscholars have been studying English vocabulary teaching from different perspectives,and yielded fruitful results. Modern scholars began to study vocabulary teaching froma cognitive perspective and applied the theory of cognitive linguistics—ConceptualMetaphor to the English vocabulary teaching. A large study showed that metaphor isnot only a device of rhetoric; it is a leading way of cognition, which can help studentsto learn and understand vocabulary. Most studies of conceptual metaphor are relatedto the university education, but rarely involve secondary stage. And high schoolEnglish teachers rarely pay attention to the value of the application of conceptualmetaphor in vocabulary teaching.Based on the detailed discussion of the theoretical background, the features, thetypes and the mechanism logistics of the Conceptual Metaphor Theory, this paperattempts to conduct empirical research to explore the use of Conceptual MetaphorTheory in senior high school vocabulary teaching to learn polysemous words, idioms,and how to connect words families. An empirical research carried out for eight weeksin the No.9Senior High School of Zhengzhou. Two classes of senior grade one in thesame level are chosen as the fairly experimental class and the control class separately.In the experimental class, the teacher teaches vocabulary using the ConceptualMetaphor Theory act as guide, but in the control class, teachers use the traditionalteaching methods. Apre-test to ensure that the two classes of English vocabulary is nosignificant difference in the level of metaphor, especially vocabulary level. This paperanalyzes the results of the experiment by t-test, and further confirmed that theapplication of Conceptual Metaphor to senior high school English vocabularyteaching has theoretical and practical significance.