An Application Of Conceptual Metaphor Theory In Teaching English Writing At Senior High School

After the 1980 s,linguists began to study metaphor from cognitive perspective,thinking that metaphor is a way for human beings to understand the world.The essence of metaphor is to understand one thing with another.People understand the characteristics of each thing and discover the differences and connections between them through their own life experience,and then construct conceptual metaphor based on the connection between the characteristics.Conceptual metaphor is one of the important tools for people to recognize and understand language,and it plays an important role in foreign language teaching.Writing is a basic skill in English learning.Students need to connect their own life and learning experience according to writing requirements,and establish thinking concepts,then select the appropriate vocabularies and sentence patterns quickly and accurately to make the article coherent.The process of students' language output is the same as process of constructing concepts.Therefore,it is particularly important to improve students' thinking ability.English writing teaching based on conceptual metaphor theory can cultivate students' consciousness of divergent thinking,improve students' ability to construct conceptual metaphor,and make students' language output more accurate and rich.In this study,the students from class 27(50)and 28(50)of Senior One at Yan'an High School were selected as the research objects.Class 27 was experimental class and class 28 was control class.Before the experiment,the author conducted a writing test for100 students to ensure that the writing level of the two classes were equivalent.During the teaching experiment,English writing teaching based on conceptual metaphor theory was adopted for the experimental class,while the original writing teaching method adopted for the control class.After the experiment,the author conducted the writing testfor two different classes again.At the same time,the author randomly selected 5 students from the experimental class for interview.Finally,the experimental data was analyzed by SPSS.17 statistical software.The research results have shown that firstly,the teaching of English writing based on conceptual metaphor theory can improve students' level of English writing.Secondly,the teaching of English writing based on conceptual metaphor theory can enrich students' vocabulary output.Thirdly,the teaching of English writing based on conceptual metaphor theory can make the students' sentence output more diverse.Fourth,the teaching of English writing based on conceptual implicit theory can help students achieve the effect of text coherence.Based on the research findings,this paper has put forward the following suggestions for high school English writing teaching: teachers must understand the content of conceptual metaphor deeply;teachers should explain some metaphorical expressions in the textbook and cultivate students' metaphorical awareness and thinking;teachers should use conceptual metaphor theory to design courses rationally based on the content of teaching materials;teachers should pay attention to the interaction between teachers and students,and help students improve their ability to construct conceptual metaphor.