The Correlation Between Senior High School Students' Metaphoric Competence And Their English Vocabulary Proficiency

Metaphor,a cognitive tool of the perception and formation of concepts,can combine the conceptional meaning and associative meaning of words.For a long time,a large number of scholars have been trying to find the approach of applying metaphor theory into Second Language Acquisition.Cognitive metaphor theory and its practice found that,as the complement of language competence and communicative competence,metaphoric competence can help deeply understand the production of meaning and provide new perspective of second language vocabulary learning and teaching.In recent years,a lot of educators began to realize the importance of metaphor competence,and required second language learners to master metaphor competence.Therefore,it is vital to study the correlation between metaphor competence and vocabulary proficiency.This study,taking 114 students of grade two in a key senior high school in Nanchang as the subjects,adopted metaphoric competence test to test students' metaphoric competence,adopted vocabulary test to test students' vocabulary proficiency,and analyzed the data with the instrument of SPSS software.The results show that: 1)The metaphoric competence of senior high school students is overall at a low level;2)There is a significant difference(P=0.000<0.05)in vocabulary proficiency between high-score students and low-score students,and the vocabulary proficiency of high-score students is distinctly higher than which of low-score students;3)There is a positive correlation between students' metaphoric competence and vocabulary proficiency,whose correlation coefficient is 0.84,which is a significant correlation.Among the three dimensions of metaphoric competence,the influence on vocabulary proficiency of ability to find meaning in metaphor is the highest,that of originality of metaphor production takes the second place,and that of fluency of metaphor interpretation is the lowest.All of the three dimensions have a positive effect on vocabulary proficiency,which means the improvement of senior high school students' metaphoric competence can help enhance their vocabulary proficiency.In addition,the study chose 8 students and 2 teachers of this school at random for an interview about metaphoric competence and vocabulary proficiency,which provides more abundant evidences for the findings.In the end,from the perspective of pedagogy,combining metaphoric theory with traditional English class teaching in senior high school,this study has proposed correspondent suggestions for teaching,so as to train students metaphoric competence,form the way of metaphoric thinking,and apply into the understanding and learning of second language vocabulary as well as improve learning efficient and achieve the aim of improve English proficiency.