An Empirical Study Based On Conceptual Metaphor Theory To English Polysemous Words Teaching In Junior Middle School

Polysemy means that one word may have more than one meaning,which is prevalent in language.For the majority of English teachers and English learners,the teaching of polysemous words has always been a priority in vocabulary teaching.However,the current situation of junior middle school students' acquisition of polysemous words is not satisfactory.Teachers often use traditional teaching methods to teach polysemous words,ignoring the relationships among the different meanings of polysemous words and lacking systematicness.Students' memory methods are mechanical,time-consuming but ineffective,so they can not accurately understand and use the words they learned.At the same time,this problem also affects the students' understanding of the deep meanings of sentences,thus restricting the improvement of students' discourse competence.In the 1980 s,with the application of metaphor study into cognitive categories,metaphor,as one of humans' language essence,thinking essence and a central tool of cognition,has entered the field of foreign language learning.The essence of metaphor is a systematic mapping from a conceptual domain to another conceptual domain,thus establishing the interrelationships among the different concepts.It is one of the important ways to expand the meanings of language,and it is also central to our understanding of how language,thought and discourse are structured.Therefore,it is necessary to explore the application of conceptual metaphor to English polysemy teaching in junior middle school,which will provide a new perspective for junior middle school to teach vocabulary.Under the guidance of conceptual metaphor theory,image schema theory and prototype theory,an experiment was carried out in English polysemous words teaching in junior middle school.The main research questions were as follows:1)Can the polysemy teaching method based on conceptual metaphor theory effectively facilitate the application of students' vocabulary knowledge and students' long-term memory?2)Can the polysemy teaching method based on conceptual metaphor theory improve students' discourse competence?The subjects of the study were from Gujiao Middle School in Xinjiang County ofYuncheng City.They were 90 students from two parallel classes in Grade Three.In the experimental,the author applied conceptual metaphor theory to English polysemy teaching,while the control class was taught by traditional methods.After 16 weeks of empirical study,the author used SPSS 17.0 to analyze and summarize the data of questionnaire,vocabulary tests and reading tests in this study.The results showed that the conceptual metaphor theory has played a positive role in vocabulary teaching.It not only helps the students understand and apply vocabulary knowledge efficiently and accurately,but also helps students deepen long-term memory of vocabulary.Meanwhile it can help the students understand the deep meanings of sentences and grasp the macro structure of the passages,thus improving students' discourse competence.Though there are some limitations in this study,this thesis provides some feasible suggestions for future polysemy teaching in junior middle school and brings some positive effects to English teaching.