An Empirical Study Of English Polysemy Teaching In Senior High Schools Based On The Conceptual Metaphor Theory

Vocabulary teaching is the focus of foreign language teaching,while polysemy is the difficulty of vocabulary teaching.The traditional English teaching considers the relationship among different senses of a polysemous word to be disparate.The teacher usually shows one sense or gives all senses of a polysemous word to students and asks them to learn from memory.Therefore,it's a burden for the learners to acquire polysemous words in vocabulary learning.In the point view of cognitive linguistics,although a word can have many senses,it has only one basic meaning,and the other meanings are metaphorically developed from the basic meaning.Metaphor is a significant way of the production and extension of meanings in language,which provides a new angle for English polysemy teaching and learning.In order to explore the feasibility and validity of applying conceptual metaphor into polysemy teaching,the thesis tries to answer the following questions:1.What effects can the teaching method based on the conceptual metaphor theory make for students in senior high schools in their learning of polysemous words?2.What effects does the teaching method based on the conceptualmetaphor theory have on students in senior high schools in terms of long-term memory of polysemous words?This study adopts the method of empirical study.The subjects in two groups are the students in senior two from Changjun High School.One class was randomly selected as the control group in which traditional vocabulary teaching is conducted,while the other was selected as the experimental group where conceptual metaphor theory is applied.The empirical research includes a pretest,classroom teaching experiments,mid-test and a post-test.The data of the experiment was analyzed by the SPSS 19.0.According to the study,we can draw the conclusions:1.Mastering the metaphorical relationships of different senses of one word explicitly does improve students' learning effectiveness of polysemous words.2.The teaching method based on the conceptual metaphor theory has the following effects: facilitating students' understanding of the relationship among different meanings so as to help students understand and memorize polysemous words,and enhancing their metaphorical competence.3.The teaching method based on conceptual metaphor theory could facilitate students' long-term retention of polysemy.Finally,this paper gives some pedagogical significances ofpolysemous words teaching based on the conceptual metaphor theory.Also,the paper discusses the limitations of the paper.Due to the limitation of time and place,there are several main limitations in terms of experimental duration time and the sample size and etc.The experiment,which lasts only 8 weeks,is relatively short and the sample size is 114,which is not big enough to support a more representable result.To seek for a more precise conclusion,the future research can last longer and a large capacity.However,the author still thinks that the experiment has its value theoretically and practically,which can offer some implications to senior high school polysemous words teaching in China.