An Experimental Study Of The Effects Of The Cultivation Of High School Students' Metaphoric Competence On Their English Reading Proficiency

According to the mainstream views of most modern metaphor theories, the essence of metaphor is to understand and experience one kind of thing in terms of another thing. In this sense, metaphor is not just a linguistic phenomenon which came into being at the point when a certain language has evolved into a relatively mature stage. More importantly, metaphor is a cognitive mode as well as a thinking pattern in human's mind. Since there is such a close relationship among metaphor, language development, human's cognition and thinking pattern, the author attempts to make an assumption that there also exists some meaningful relationship between students' metaphoric competence and English language proficiency. Based on this assumption,the author raises the research question: 1) Is the English reading teaching based on the cultivation of high school students' metaphoric competence more effective to improve their reading proficiency? 2) Do high school students accept English reading teaching based on the cultivation of their metaphoric competence?With the major intention of find out the answers to the research questions, the author makes an experimental study by doing a controlled experiment on Class Three and Class Four of Senior One in Licheng High School, Zengcheng District,Guangzhou City. Class Three is the control group and Class Four is the experimental group. In the first step, two tests are employed to survey and test these students' original metaphoric competence and English reading proficiency in both groups.Through data analysis by using SPSS 19.0, it is found that there is no remarkable difference between the two groups in their original metaphoric competence and English reading proficiency, which thus guarantees the validity of the later experimental results. The second step is to execute the experiment of one-term teaching of English reading. Without other variables, the students in the experimental group are trained to improve their English reading ability through intentional cultivation of metaphoric competence while the students in the control group are taught with the traditional teaching methods. After such an experimental teachingterm of English reading course, post-tests respectively for judging metaphoric competence and English reading proficiency are given to the students in both groups.Through the data analysis of their paper scores again with SPSS 19.0, it is shown that there comes out a significant difference between the two groups and that the experimental group's English reading proficiency is considerably higher than that of the control group. Besides the eight tests, at the end of the experiments, all the students in the experimental class are interviewed for the purpose of having an understanding of their attitudes towards the use of conceptual metaphor in English reading teaching.From the experimental results, it is concluded that the cultivation of metaphoric competence is more effective to promote high school students' English reading proficiency, and that high school students like this teaching method very much.Therefore, in the teaching practice of English reading courses students should be encouraged to build their metaphoric consciousness so as to improve their English language competence ultimately.