A Study Of The Correlation Between Metaphoric Comprehension Competence And English Reading Competence For Senior High School Students

Reading competence plays a important role in the development of English language competence.In reality,senior high school students have some difficulties in reading comprehension,especially the culture-related difficulties.The culture-related difficulties reflect in all levels of reading,such as lexical and sentence level.Metaphor is the cognitive tool of people's thinking and life.Metaphor is not only exists in language,but also in mind and action.Reading is regarded as a kind of cognitive activity,while requires critical thinking,imagination and so on.Compared metaphor and reading,then metaphor and reading process share some similar characteristics can be found in the metaphor process and the cognitive process of reading.In this way,many scholars attempt to use metaphor or metaphoric competence to solve the difficulties of reading comprehension.But there are only a few empirical researches among these studies.This thesis applies empirical research method to explore the correlation between senior high school students' metaphoric comprehension competence and reading competence.This thesis explore the answer of three questions:1)What are the distribution characteristics of metaphor in senior high school students' reading materials? 2)What are the current situation of senior high school students' metaphoric comprehension competence and reading competence? 3)How is the correlation between senior high students' metaphoric comprehension competence and English reading competence?According to three research questions,three research instruments are designed.They are metaphor text analysis,the metaphoric comprehension competence test and the reading competence test.Within 102 subjects in senior grade two,the data of the research is collected.Through the descriptive statistics and spearman correlation coefficient of SPSS method,the findings of this research include:(1)There are many metaphors in senior high school students' reading materials.The quantities of metaphors in different kind of reading genres are different.And the quantities of three types of metaphors in different kind of reading genres are also different.(2)The senior high school students' metaphoric comprehension competence is at below-medium level.(3)The senior high schoolhigh school students' reading competence need to be improved,especially the reading competence of exposition need to be improved greatly.(4)The senior high school students' metaphoric compression competence correlates with reading competence greatly.(5)The three types of metaphoric comprehension competence correlate with reading competence.And the correlation between senior high school students' reading competence and ontological metaphoric comprehension competence is at the highest level.(6)The English reading competence of four kinds of reading genres correlate with metaphoric comprehension competence.And the correlation between senior high school students' metaphoric comprehension and argumentation is at the highest level.Through the exploration of the correlation between the senior high school students' metaphoric comprehension competence and English reading competence,the author attempts to explain the metaphor comprehension process and the reading process of senior high school students.At the same time,the author attempts to provide a reference to the scientific design and the practice of the teaching of English reading for senior high school English teachers.