An Empirical Study Of International Students' Metaphoric Competence Cultivation In Chinese Writing Courses

Cognitive linguistics holds the view that the meaning of language comes from the interaction between human beings and the objective world around them.The recent findings of cognitive linguistics into second language acquisition directly lead to the recent birth of applied cognitive linguistics.Metaphor has been a window through which we can uncover how cognitive linguistics,second language acquisition and other theories interact with each other.Metaphor has also been a platform through which people know more about relationships between human beings,language and the world.Therefore,metaphoric competence has become the focus of applied linguistics.Based on metaphor theories from the cognitive perspective,this research targets to explore the positive influence which the metaphoric instruction method has on Chinese as a foreign language writing teaching.A Control Group(CG)and an Experimental Group(EG)with similar proficiency in Chinese were chosen randomly to participate in the research.While the two groups underwent same teaching content,in the EG metaphoric contents were added and the writing course developed under the learning of metaphoric theories.The two groups also received four tests on writing and metaphor respectively,two pretests to conduct if the students' Chinese writing and metaphoric competence were at similar level and two posttests to justify the effectiveness of the training.All the data was collected and analyzed with the software SPSS 18.0.The analysis predicted the success of the experiment and the students in EG indeed had surpassed those in CG both in discourse writing and metaphoric competence.On the base of the data analysis and discussion,the major findings are as follows.1)The current situation of the metaphoric competence and the writing of the international students relatively stay at relatively a low level;2)There is a positive correlation relationship between the metaphor interpretation,production and the international students' writing,but the correlation between metaphor identification and writing is not so obvious;3)The metaphoric competence can be improved by conducting the experimental teaching,opening a new area for the Teaching Chinese as a Foreign Language(TCFL)research.