Application Of Metaphor In The Teaching Of English Grammar

Grammar is an essential part of English language knowledge for students in senior high schools,as well as an important task of English teaching.The traditional teaching methods focus on grammatical forms and rules,but pay little attention to their motivation,which leads to a boring and monotonous classroom atmosphere and thus a poor grammar proficiency among students.It has become essential to explore a new teaching method that students really embrace to improve English teaching and learning.Metaphor is based on similarity between the source domain and the target domain,whose essence is understanding and experiencing one kind of thing in terms of another.This thesis is designed to show how to apply metaphor theory in the teaching of English grammar,and attempts to testify whether metaphor theory applied in the teaching of English grammar in senior high school can be effective.The author brings about two questions:(1)Can metaphor theory applied in the teaching of English grammar in senior high school enhance students' interest in learning English grammar?(2)Can metaphor theory applied in the teaching of English grammar in senior high school improve students' English grammar proficiency?This thesis,based on metaphor theory,proposes the idea that application of metaphor theory in the teaching of English grammar in senior high school can be feasible and effective.To verify this hypothesis,the author,taking students of Senior II from Zhangzhou Experimental Middle School in Fujian Province as trial objects,carried out a one-semester contrastive teaching experiment between metaphoric and traditional Grammar teaching.The thesis involved questionnaires and a teaching experiment.Before the teaching experiment,questionnaires were applied in both contrastive group and the experimental group to get to know the students' current learning situation and their difficulties in learning English grammar.And then pre-tests on students' English overall proficiency and English grammar proficiency were held in both groups.The outcome of those pre-tests was processed by SPSS19.0.Through analyzing the data between the contrastive group and the experimental group,the author tries to find out whether the two groups' English grammar proficiency is at the samelevel before the teaching experiment.After the teaching experiment,post-tests on English grammar proficiency were given to the students of both groups,and the results were analyzed by SPSS19.0.The Independent Simple T-test with the post-test English grammar grades of both groups shows that the significance probability is 0.028?0.05,which means there are significant differences between the English grammar proficiency of contrastive group and the experimental group after the teaching experiment.Therefore,application of metaphor theory in the teaching of English grammar is feasible and effective.Hopefully,this study will offer some reference for the future research.