The Effect Of Metaphor Teaching On Senior English Majors' Metaphoric Competence Development

Metaphor,since the emergence of cognitive linguistics in the 1980s,has been deemed as a cognitive tool and then employed into other disciplinary study.According to the studies conducted,it has been found that the discourse produced by foreign language learners is good in terms of both language form and grammatical meaning,but it is not natural compared to native language.One of the reasons is that foreign language learners lack of metaphoric thinking based on target language.Therefore,the cultivation of metaphoric competence is bound to be incorporated as an indispensable part of foreign language teaching and learning.While so far most of the studies conducted are theoretical or conclusive with few of them are empirical ones.Additionally,on account of that Chinese English learners usually lack of metaphoric competence and also in consideration of the inferiority of traditional English teaching model,the study,based on the elaboration on basic notions of conceptual metaphor,idioms,metaphoric competence and conceptual metaphor theory as well as idiom's decomposition theory,adopts metaphor teaching which combines metaphor and teaching to explore its effect on senior English majors' metaphoric competence(MC)development.To be specific,three major research questions are proposed as follows:(1)What's effect of metaphor teaching on senior English majors' metaphor identification development?(2)What's effect of metaphor teaching on senior English majors' metaphor comprehension development?(3)What's effect of metaphor teaching on senior English majors' metaphor interpretation development?The subjects of the study are 40 junior English majors in a college of normal university in Jiangsu Province.The instrument involved in the test is the adapted metaphoric competence test(MCT)designed by Janette Littlemore(2001).The experiment begins with pretest,proceeds with mid-test and ends up with post-test to access students'metaphoric competence after the metaphor teaching at different stages.After the data analysis by SPSS 18.0,three following major findings have been derived:Firstly,metaphor teaching has greatly facilitated EFL learners' metaphor identification and the longer duration of metaphor teaching lasts,the better students may develop in their metaphor identification.Secondly,students' metaphoric comprehension is underdeveloped and also there's no statistically significance between their initial metaphor comprehension and that of later achievement after the early stage of metaphor teaching.Thirdly,metaphor teaching plays a limited role in boosting senior English majors'metaphor interpretation but the boost is lower than that of metaphor identification.Based on the research findings above,some pedagogical suggestions for English classroom teaching have been put forward:(1)improving students' metaphoric awareness by noticing;(2)cultivating students' metaphoric thinking through metaphor-based language learning;(3)distinguishing the intercultural difference between two languages.