The Application Of Conceptual Metaphor To The Teaching Of English Reading In Senior High School

Lakoff and Johnson advanced that the essence of metaphor is understanding and experiencing one kind of thing in terms of another. The application of Conceptual Metaphor to English teaching is essential and meaningful. The current study of Conceptual Metaphor mainly focused on the lexical, phrasal and sentential presentation. Recently some researchers have dealt with the application of Conceptual Metaphor to English reading teaching from the theoretical perspectives. They don’t explain how to combine theory and practice and don’t do empirical researches. So they fail to provide satisfactory answers to how Conceptual Metaphor facilitates the improvement of culture consciousness and discourse analysis.On the basis of previous researches, Conceptual Metaphor is applied to the teaching of English reading. Combining the theory and practice together, the author provides some curricular and extra-curricular instances. The empirical part of this thesis is composed of two classes, including experimental class and regular class. The students will receive about three-month teaching activities. The author will analyze the experimental data by SPSS software. Through the analysis of theory application and the experimental data, the paper arrives at the following conclusions:the theory of Conceptual Metaphor facilitates the accumulation of students’ background knowledge and the understanding of culture meaning; the discourse function of Conceptual Metaphor promotes the understanding the cohesion and coherence of the texts. Students can understand both the surface and the deep meaning of the text. Then they get further understanding of the emotional attitude and meaning of the texts.To sum up, based on the theoretical study of the application of Conceptual Metaphor to English reading teaching, the thesis tries to prove that this is practical and effective. The author wants to arouse the consciousness of senior English teaching embedded with Conceptual Metaphor, and provides a reference for English teaching.