A Study Of The Metaphor Comprehension Strategies On English Learners Of Different Proficiency

In the field of the metaphor cognition, metaphor study has always been attracting constant attention. The previous studies mainly deal with metaphor research under the perspective of cross-culture and cross-language,and most of them mainly touch on the production of metaphor comprehension, instead of the process of metaphor comprehension. Through the study of metaphor comprehension among learners of different English proficiency, we can better understand the processing mechanism of metaphor, improve the metaphorical competence, and finally making the English learning more efficient.This thesis, based on conceptual metaphor theory, adopted the method of metaphor comprehension task and interview and took 56 students majoring in mathematics and linguistic as the subjects. The thesis studies the metaphor comprehension strategies of English learners of different proficiency, and the relationship between metaphor comprehension strategies and English proficiency, as well as, what facilitate the accuracy of comprehending metaphor, and what lead to misunderstanding of metaphor. In order to enrich the data from different perspectives, the major research instruments are the metaphor comprehension task and interview. Based on the classification of metaphor comprehension strategies, the thesis calculates the frequencies of metaphor comprehension strategies of learners of different proficiency and analyses the collected corpus.The results show:(1) the most frequently used strategy by high proficiency learners is inferring meaning from the context, followed by L2 knowledge, while the most frequently used strategy by low proficiency learners is inferring meaning from the context, followed by guessing randomly.(2) English proficiency has a significant effect on the choice of metaphor comprehension strategies. There is no significant effect between the strategies of inferring the meaning from the context and using the literal meaning, which verify the hypothesis of“Context Effect” and “Graded Salience Hypothesis” in second language learning. Besides, there is significant effect between English knowledge and guessing randomly. It is obvious that high proficiency group adopts more L2 knowledge than low proficiency group, whereas the low proficiency group uses more frequently in strategy of guessing randomly when comprehending metaphorical words or phrases.(3) for the learners of high proficiency group, the strategy of English knowledge is most helpful to figure out the metaphorical meaning;For the learners of low proficiency group, the strategy of inferring the meaning from context is most helpful.Although there are some differences between these two groups, the basic step for metaphor comprehension should be, firstly, we should correctly extract the literal meaning. Secondly, we should correctly understand the context of the whole sentence. Thirdly, put the literal meaning into the context, if it conforms to the context, thenwe apply it. Lastly, we should check the metaphorical meaning with several other strategies. If all the strategies lead to the same answer, at this time, we can know we have the right answer. Concerning what lead to the wrong guess, that depends on different English proficiency. For the learners of high proficiency group, firstly, it is L1 knowledge that misleads them to the wrong meaning. Secondly, it results from their wrong translation of the words or phrases. Thirdly, it comes from the wrong guess of figurative meaning. For the learners of low proficiency, they share the same reason as the learners of high proficiency. But most important reasons is the weakness of language competence, for they cannot correctly understand the context and figure out the literal meaning of the whole phrases. With a limited vocabulary and foreign culture background knowledge, they make a lot of mistakes without doubt.