| Generally speaking, phonetics, lexicon and grammar are the very three basic elements in English learning as well as teaching, among which, the importance of vocabulary learning is self-evident. Nevertheless, vocabulary teaching has not been attached importance to until 1970 s when it has become a hot debated topic in linguistics. When mentioned traditional vocabulary teaching, problems are turning up. It is common that teachers in class seldom discuss memory strategies but very often do dictations. Therefore, students often mechanically recite vocabulary by its pronunciation, form and meaning. Unfortunately, both of them fail to figure out an effective way to retain vocabulary with the respect of human’s cognition. Thus, this thesis makes an attempt to apply cognitive metaphor to English vocabulary teaching aims at providing an effective way for current vocabulary teaching in senior high school.The research of metaphor has gone through quite a long history of over 2400 years during which theories about it were gradually advanced. And the earliest study would be dated back to Aristotle’s Poetics(1987) in ancient Greek, who defined that metaphor was a language phenomenon that referring one thing by another. Moreover, he supported that metaphor was a figure of speech, e.g. simile, metaphor, personification, metonymy, euphemistic, synaesthesia and so on. Contrastively, for cognitive linguistics, metaphor is not only a linguistic phenomenon but also a cognitive tool for people’s thinking and talking. In 1980, Metaphors We Live by written by Lakoff & Johnson was published which was regarded as the beginning of studying cognitive metaphor. They emphasized that metaphor functioned as a human cognitive mechanism and a large part of words’ structure and meaning originated from metaphor, as it were, metaphor intertwines with language learning.Therefore, it is necessary to conduct empirical and intensive studies in senior high school before students enter college, and this thesis attempts to answer the following two research questions by two questionnaires and conducting an experiment :1). What is the current situation of vocabulary teaching in senior high school? 2). Can the application of conceptual metaphor improve students’ vocabulary proficiency?18 teachers and 124 students from NO.3 Middle School of Gejiu participated this empirical study. Questionnaires, pretest and posttest this thesis adopted were designed by Wang Qun(2012), based on which the author made some changes. The results of questionnaires showed that traditional teaching methods enjoyed great popularity in vocabulary teaching, and few of teachers knew conceptual metaphor let alone use it. Similarly, students usually recite vocabulary by rote, thus they often can not use them appropriately in real context. However, the analyzed results of the pretest and posttest showed that students’ vocabulary proficiency could be more or less improved after conducting the experiment in EC and CC for almost three months. Therefore, to some extent, applying conceptual metaphor to vocabulary teaching can be another effective way for students retaining vocabulary. “Metaphor can serve as linguistic tools for overcoming certain cognitive limitations, and functions as a tool to extend the capacity of active memory by using medium of speech in communication”(Sticht, 1998, p.622). That is to say, most of times, metaphors can provide vivid images for students’ vocabulary memorization, because of words’ various implications.Based on the analyzed data from questionnaires and tests, this thesis puts forward some suggestions in the view of CMT to improve current vocabulary teaching and learning, which may help students memorize words by metaphorical thinking and improve their vocabulary proficiency in language use not just by rote mechanically. Above all, it is high time that teachers, as an essential part in English teaching activity, explored a new effective teaching method to improve present worrying situation. |
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