A Study On Correlation Between Senior High School Students' Metaphor Competence And English Reading Proficiency

The National English Curriculum Standards for General High school(2017)has made many requirements for English reading skill,such as:extracting main information and opinions from discourse,understand the gist of discourse,grasping key concepts and details in discourse,etc.,which shows that it is particularly important to cultivate senior high school students'English reading competence.In addition,metaphor competence,language competence and communicative competence are known as the main linguistic competence.Having metaphor competence is conducive to English learners'understanding of the culture behind the language.Therefore,it can be seen that metaphor competence is one of the important factors to improve senior high school students'English reading proficiency.Consequently,in order to improve high school students'metaphor competence and English reading proficiency,the author carries out an empirical study on correlation between senior high school students'metaphor competence and English reading proficiency.With the methods of literature research,questionnaire survey and statistical analysis,choosing 277 students of Grade Two from five seniors high schools in Fujian,Guangxi,Heilongjiang,and Tianjin as research subjects,the study aims to investigate the following questions with the metaphoric competence test and English reading proficient test and the statistical tool SPSS 21.0:1.What is the level of senior high school students'metaphor competence?2.Is there any correlation between senior high school students'metaphor competence and English reading proficiency?If so,what is the correlation?Through the statistic analysis,the results indicate that:1.Senior high school students'metaphor competence is under expectation(m=2.6712).The competence to understand and interpret metaphorical expressions in the specific context of target language is the best(m=3.4707),to find metaphoric meaning is the worse(m=3.0484),and the fluency of metaphoric interpretation is the worst(m=1.4196).2.The English reading proficiency of the group with high metaphor competence(m=3.8768)is higher than that of the group with low metaphor competence(m=2.0786)and there is a significant difference between them(p=0.00<0.05).There is significantly positive correlation between senior high school students'metaphor competence and English reading proficiency(r=0.702)and the metaphor competence can explain 49.3%of English reading proficiency(r~2=0.493).In terms of specific types of questions,there is also significantly positive correlation between senior high school students'metaphor competence and competence of guessing word meaning(r=0.466),senior high school students'metaphor competence and competence of understanding the main idea(r=0.585),senior high school students'metaphor competence and competence of reasoning and judging(r=0.410).Based on the results above,the author proposes to enhance students'metaphor competence by playing their leading role and improving students'cross-cultural awareness.What's more,teachers should apply metaphor theory to English reading teaching,in order to enhance students'metaphoric awareness and metaphor competence,and ultimately promote their English reading proficiency.