An Empirical Study Of The Effect Of Grammatical Metaphorical Competence Cultivation On Senior High School Students' English Writing

Metaphor is a common linguistic phenomenon,and it is a manifestation of cognitive ability.According to Halliday,grammatical metaphor achieves the transition from congruent to metaphorical form through word-class transformation and rank shift at the lexico-grammatical layer,which makes the use of language flexible and creative.People can choose an appropriate expression in accordance with context.Lack of conceptual fluency in English is one of the main reasons for high school students' poor writing,which seems straightforward,dull,colloquial and inappropriate.It is believed that grammatical metaphor is pertinent to the problems in writing,caused by the lack of conceptual fluency.As the high school students have a relatively solid foundation of English,this study attempts to examine whether it is possible to introduce the knowledge of grammatical metaphor into English writing teaching of senior high school students.Through conscious learning,the high school students' grammatical metaphorical competence is to be developed.And then the effect of grammatical metaphor on the English writing will be discussed.In this study,60 high school students in Grade Two were selected as research subjects.Among them 30 students were selected as the experimental group and the other 30 as the controlled group.The overall English level of the experimental group and the control group are equal,they have not been trained with any grammatical metaphorical knowledge before.The experimental group was given 8 weeks of teaching to introduce the knowledge of grammatical metaphor and to strengthen the ability to convert word class and sentence patterns in their spare time,while the students in the control group were taught in the routine.Through the data analysis on the retelling and writing activities before and after the training,the following results were obtained:(1)As for the experimental group,the output of grammatical metaphor forms after training is significantly higher than that before training.(2)In the argumentative writing based on conversion from spoken language to written language,the scores of the students in the experimental group have been significantly improved,and the output of the nominalization,which embodies the characteristics of the written language,is significantly higher than that of the control group;however,by analyzing the students' high-score compositions and low-score compositions,it is found that there is no significant difference between them.(3)In the subsequent interviews,the finding shows that the use of grammatical metaphor enriches the form of written language.The students from the experimental group can choose appropriate expressions according to the specific context and increase their own confidence in writing.The findings of this empirical study prove that it is feasible and effective to apply the knowledge of grammatical metaphor to the teaching of English in senior high school.Grammatical metaphor knowledge helps to promote students' diversity of English expressions,improve students' awareness of contextual information and meaning construction,enhance the appropriateness of the language and students' self confidence in writing.To cultivate students' ability to use grammatical metaphor flexibly and reasonably according to different contexts is of positive significance for promoting the reform of writing teaching in senior high schools.