An Experimental Study On Effects Of Cultivating Metaphoric Competence On Reading Level Of Junior High School Students

Metaphor is not only a way of thinking of human beings, but also an important way and method for us to understand the world. And metaphor is outstanding in foreign language learning and teaching. Metaphorical competence and linguistic competence and communicative competence are helpful to complement each other,which constitutes the three most important factors for English learners to master native English. At present, many achievements have been made in the study of the concept and classification of metaphorical competence in China. However, there are few researches about metaphoric competence on the foreign language teaching. On the other hand, English reading is a kind of learning method for English learners in our country, and it is also the goal of learning English. Cultivating English learners’ reading skills is very important and improving students’ English reading ability has become an important teaching objective. How to improve students’ reading ability is a subject that many teachers love to explore.In this paper, the experiment was conducted on 101 students on Grade Nine in Guangzhou No. 17 middle school. The purpose of the study was to investigate the general situation of the metaphoric competence of the subjects, and to explore whether teachers can improve the students’ metaphoric competence in the teaching method of cultivating students’ metaphoric competence and further improve the students’ reading performance. We have carried out experiments on the experimental group and control group. The experimental group cultivated students’ metaphoric competence in English teaching consciously, and the control group is the traditional English teaching. Experiment maintains one semester(16 weeks).The study found that the students of Grade Nine did not have a systematic understanding of the concept of metaphor. And the results of the post-test showed that consciously cultivating students’ metaphoric competence can improve their level of understanding metaphor and enhance their English reading performance and make them more interested in learning English.This study explores the relationship between metaphoric competence and reading achievement in English reading teaching and advocates that we should cultivate students’ metaphoric competence and strengthen their metaphorical awareness, so that the students’ reading proficiency and reading quality can be improved.