An Empirical Study On The Influence Of English Proficiency On Competence And Strategies Of Metaphor Comprehension

Metaphor is not only a device of rhetoric but human beings' fundamental way of thinking.It is pervasive in everyday life. Foreign language learners are bound to be confronted with all kinds of metaphors in target language and understanding them is necessarily important. Besides,metaphor comprehension is an indispensable part of metaphorical competence, which is one of the keys to successful learning of a foreign language.Metaphor comprehension has always been a meaningful topic. This thesis is about to investigate the influence of English proficiency on metaphor comprehension from the perspective of outcome and process of thinking, i.e. competence and strategy use of metaphor comprehension.The research questions include:(1) Does English proficiency have a significant influence on metaphor comprehension competence? If it does, how does it influence metaphor comprehension competence?(2) Does English proficiency have a significant influence on metaphor comprehension strategies? If it does, how does it influence metaphor comprehension strategies?The subjects in this research are picked out from those students who joined a studying-abroad program in Fenyang College of Shanxi Medical University in the year of 2012.There were 141 candidates in the program among whom 44 students succeeded in studying in Singapore's colleges while 97 students failed and went on their study in Fenyang College. Until the conducting of this research, the overseas students have been studying in Singapore for more than two years while the domestic students have been receiving regular college English education and turned juniors. In this thesis, 40 subjects are chosen from the overseas students as the higher level English learners while 48 subjects are chosen from the domestic students as the lower level English learners.This thesis employs a quantitative design supplemented by a qualitative design. Xu(2013)'s questionnaire of metaphor comprehension competence and strategies is used, followed by an interview about strategy use.After collecting data, independent-samples t-test is used to find out whether the two groups of subjects with different English proficiency show a significant difference in metaphor comprehension competence. Afterwards, two-way mixed design ANOVA is employed to find out whether the two groups with different English proficiency show significant differences in the use of five strategies. Combined with the interview, the major findings indicate that:First, English proficiency does have a significant influence on metaphor comprehension competence. High level English learners significantly understand metaphors better than low level English learners.Second, English proficiency does not have a significant influence on the use of the strategy of sentence context, but it has a significant influence on the use of the strategy of literal translation,Chinese knowledge, English concept and mental image. For high level English learners, they tend to depend more on cultural and conceptual knowledge of the target language while low level English learners have a preference for making use of Chinese knowledge. Besides, low level English learners tend to adopt the strategy of literal translation and mental image to compensate for their incompetence in English proficiency.In the end, some implications for improving L2 teaching and learning and suggestions for future study have been proposed.