A Study On The Application Of Conceptual Metaphor Theory To College English Vocabulary Teaching

Vocabulary is an important part of language learning,which plays a key role in foreign language learning and teaching. The mastery and use of vocabulary directly affect the students' skills of listening, speaking, reading, writing and translating. In China,English, as a foreign language, has become one of the important contents of university study, including vocabulary learning and teaching. Actually, vocabulary teaching has not been the research topic of linguistics until 1970s. However, there are a lot of drawbacks in methods of college vocabulary teaching and learning. For college English teachers,they often pay much attention to the pronunciation, literal meanings and usages of English words while neglecting their associative meanings. Therefore, systematic and scientific methods in vocabulary memorization and comprehension are needed for students. For students, most of them memorize vocabulary in a mechanical and non-systematic way and ignore the semantic relations between words. As a result,learners often do not have a very good command of vocabulary. The comprehension of vocabulary is supposed to take learners' cognitive factors into consideration, which are always paid little attention to in vocabulary teaching and learning. In this way, it is hard for students to acquire both the literal meaning and associative meaning. As a result,students are usually not able to apply what they have learned in the vocabulary to the communicative situations. In order to resolve these problems in vocabulary teaching and learning, a scientific theory should be employed in vocabulary teaching and learning.More and more researchers at home and abroad have realized the importance and the impacts of the conceptual metaphor on vocabulary teaching and learning.Researchers at home and abroad have studied metaphor for a very long time.Traditionally, it was considered that metaphor was just as rhetorical means used in literature. In 1980, Lakoff and Johnson pointed out, in Metaphors we live by, that metaphor is not only a rhetorical device as a kind of linguistic phenomenon but also people's cognitive activity and thought. In other words,metaphor is also supposed to be studied in cognitive aspect. The conceptual metaphor theory, which has had a big impact on linguistics, was put forward by Lakoff and Johnson. It is believed that people can understand and comprehend abstract things by ways of concrete and familiar things thatwe have already known. As a result, the conceptual metaphor theory may provide a brand new angle to teaching and learning of college English vocabulary. The author has ever taught English to the freshmen of undergraduates in Hubei Institute of Fine Arts in 2016.Taking the convenience into consideration, the author chose 94 non-English major college graduates in the Art Design department of HIFA as participants and then carefully carried out the experiment and research for eight weeks. 47 students from the controlled group is taught by the traditional way while those from the experimental group is taught by the conceptual metaphor. The experiment consists of the pre-test, teaching procedure,post-test and the questionnaire. After the experiment, the data will be analyzed carefully.This thesis tries to verify if the conceptual metaphor theory is feasible and helpful in vocabulary teaching and learning at college. Based on this aim, this thesis proposes three hypotheses:(1) Learners at college have the metaphorical competence and applying the conceptual metaphor theory to college vocabulary teaching and learning is feasible.(2) Based on the conceptual metaphor theory, a more scientific and systematic way to teach and learn English vocabulary improves the efficiency in memorizing and using English vocabulary for learners.(3) Based on the conceptual metaphor theory, a more scientific and systematic way to teach and learn English vocabulary improves metaphorical competence.Before the experiment, the results of scores and questionnaires show that most of them have heard about the metaphor and can point out the metaphor in some simple sentences and understand the meanings in both EG and CG. The author can make a conclusion that participants in college have the metaphorical competence. Furthermore,the scores of the CG and EG in the pre-test are compared with each other, indicating the two groups have the same level of vocabulary. Therefore, it can be concluded that the application of conceptual metaphor to vocabulary teaching is feasible.After the experiment, the data indicate that most participants in EG can learn vocabulary more quickly and efficiently and become more interested in English. What is better, most of them have realized that the conceptual metaphor is pervasive in English and can figure out the conceptual metaphor in some English sentences with ease. More specifically, most of them have developed their metaphor awareness and can use some phrases or words with metaphor in writing and speaking easily. Besides, the majority of participants think their English vocabulary has been improved to some extent and even suggest the conceptual metaphor should be introduced to vocabulary teaching. Besides,according to scores of the pre-test and the post-test in EG and CG, participants in EG have made more progress than CG. As the questions in the pre-test and the post-test are all about metaphor, the higher scores of participants in EG indicate that their metaphorical competence has been improved.In other words, the experiment verified the three hypotheses proposed above.