A Study On The English Writing Teaching In Senior High School Based On Conceptual Metaphor Theory

As an important part in measuring language output,English writing plays a very important role in English learning.However,writing has not received enough attention at present.During the internship,senior high school English teaching still focuses on the practice of vocabulary,sentence collocation and grammar,ignoring the cultivation of students' writing ability."Imitating,copying,and reciting" is a consistent writing teaching mode that leads to a top-down disregard.Therefore,students' writing habits are bad.The words and phrases they used in the composition cannot express their intended thought,the sentence is confusing with strong Chinese way of thinking;the whole article lacks of innovation and coherence and students are not strong enough in analyzing and solving problems.So,like the picture composition written by students in primary school,the whole article is as loose as the sand,giving people a sense of harshness.In essence,it is the difference of metaphorical cognition between L2 learners' native language(Chinese)and target language(English)that leads to these results.Conceptual metaphor is a kind of thinking mode and cognitive tool of human beings.It is essentially a system mapping which is across the conceptual domains.Through metaphor,students can understand abstract concepts(such as thinking,emotion,etc.)by more concrete concepts(such as space,entity,etc.).Applying it into senior high school English writing teaching will inevitably have a significant effect on the accuracy and richness of vocabulary and innovation and coherence of the whole writings.This thesis attempts to use the conceptual metaphor theory proposed by Lakoff and Johnson as a guide to cultivate students' divergent thinking,strengthen textual coherence and improve their writing ability.At the same time,this research hopes to change the current dull English class and bring new ideas to students' writing.And this paper attempts to explore three issues by comparing with the traditional writing teaching method: 1)Through the study of conceptual metaphor theory,how does students' interest develop? 2)What kind of effects does writing teaching based on conceptual metaphor theory have on students' ability in English metaphoric comprehension and metaphoric output? 3)How does English writing teaching based on conceptual metaphor theory benefit for students' writing ability?This study uses quantitative and qualitative analysis methods and selects two parallel classes in the first grade of Changxing Island Senior High School in Dalian as the research objects,conducting a one-semester teaching experiment.The writing teaching based on conceptual metaphor theory is applied in the experimental class while the control class remains to use traditional writing teaching method.Experimental method,questionnairesurvey and interview method are used in the paper.A total of two tests,three interviews and one questionnaire are conducted during the experiment,and finally the results are statistically analyzed by SPSS 22.0.In the conclusion,the research shows that English writing teaching based on conceptual metaphor theory has positive influence for students' writing ability,and it has profound significance for the theory and its application.First of all,the richness of vocabulary,the diversity of language expression and textual logic and coherence have all been significantly achieved,and the writing ability has been improved.Secondly,through the understanding and learning of conceptual metaphors,students' metaphorical ability is improved and they can apply it into the English learning better.Finally,the fluency of the writing process has strengthened students' self-confidence in English learning and improved students' interest in learning as well as the consciousness of self-learning.