An Empirical Study Based On Conceptual Metaphor Theory To English Polysemous Words Teaching In Senior High Schools

Vocabulary is a very important component of language, and polysemy is a general language phenomenon. For the sake of the economical principle of human language, people tend to fulfill their communication needs with less time and effort, polysemy phenomenon come into being and keep developing under such circumstance. Up to now, there are very few monosemy in English,and a very big amount of words are polysemy. Researches on polysemy gained increasing attention in the 1980 s. In the horizon of cognitive linguistics, conceptual metaphor is a universally –existed mechanism of human thinking and cognitive process. With full and sharp argument from the scopes of Empiricism and Ontology, It is demonstrated by Lakoff & Johnson(1980) that our usual concept system is essentially metaphorical. Along with the fact that the formation and change of word senses is inextricably related with the development of human concept system, metaphor and metonmy shed different light on understanding the sense relations among the various meanings of one polysemous word.Based on the Conceptual Metaphor Theory, this thesis tries to offer a new perspective and some feasible suggestions to polysemous words teaching of senior high schools through an empirical study on polysemyin senior high classrooms. The empirical research is implemented to answer two questions:(1) In contrast with traditional polysemous words teaching, what impacts does polysemous words teaching based on Conceptual Metaphor Theory have on polysemous words learning of senior high students.(2) What effects does classroom metaphor instruction have on senior high students’ ability of conceptual metaphor identification and meaning deduction.The different research objects manifest the innovation of this study,most of the previous empirical studies focus on college students majored in English or non-English majors in college, the objects of this research are senior high students. More specifically, the 120 objects come from a senior high school second grade in Jiangxi province. The objects are divided into control group and experimental group according to the natural classes. The control group adopt the traditional polysemy teaching process(list the various meanings, illustrate each meaning one by one, do drills in different context with sentence practice), while the experimental group adopt the polysemy teaching based on Conceptual Metaphor Theory, the teaching procedures are as follows: First, the teacher conducts an instruction of the metaphor theory in order to lay a foundation for students to understand metaphors in use. Second the teacher conducts the metaphor-based polysemous words instruction with three steps : list allthe senses of the polysemous word selected, illustrate the sense relations from the perspective of metaphor and draw a semantic relation graph.The pre-test, immediate test and delayed test are applied as research instruments. Filling the blank, multiple choice, short answer questions,metaphor deduction questions sentence translation are included in the pre-test, the total score is 100 marks. The immediate test is equal to the pre-test in question types, total score and the degree of difficulty.Modeled after the first part of immediate test in content, the difference of the delayed test lies in its question orders. The experiment lasts eight weeks, the collected data is analyzed with spss21.0.The conclusions are as follows: For the first question, in contrast with traditional polysemous words teaching, there are three kinds of impact polysemous words teaching based on Conceptual Metaphor Theory have on polysemous words learning of senior high students. First,the metaphor-based polysemous words instruction is more efficient in improving the learners’ accuracy of matching the exact sense with corresponding context compared with the traditional instruction. Second,the metaphor-based polysemous words instruction devoted much more positive impact on learners’ whole picture of all senses in one polysemous word compared to traditional instruction. Third, the metaphor-based polysemous words instruction shows significant effects on learner’s long-term retention of polysemous words learning. For thesecond question, after the metaphor instruction, students’ identification and meaning deduction ability of orientational metaphor and structural metaphor improves to a much higher level while the ontological metaphor a little lower under the metaphor instruction.The research is aimed to apply polysemy teaching in senior high classrooms from a new perspective based on Conceptual Metaphor Theory. According to the results and the process of the study, the author throws out some suggestions in order to help senior high students master polysemy and better develop their language ability.