Vocabulary Teaching And Conceptual Metaphorical Thinking Cultivation For Non-English Major Students: A Holistic Educational Perspective

The theory of holistic education focuses on the comprehensive development of educated human being,emphasizes the holistic competence on individual creativity and diverse social lives and stresses educated people's mental maturity and cognitive development.Accordingly,the higher education takes the responsibility to cultivate the educated individual with the ability of cross-disciplinary,knowledge fusion and personal sustainable growth.All these comprehensive competences and sustainable growth are built on the solid foundation of language skills and literacy.Vocabulary is the foundation of language and students' stock of vocabulary directly impacts their language performance and restrains the development of listening,speaking,reading,writing and translating.Consequently,in English teaching and learning,all the participants should attach importance to vocabulary,and actively explore vocabulary teaching theory and methods.Numerous linguists and educators have made much research on these issues which includes cognitive metaphor research.Metaphor is an important aspect of cognition and the thinking way we live by.Cognitive metaphor sheds light on English vocabulary teaching and learning.Metaphoric competence is the ability human being possesses to decode his speech in terms of the language's embedded concept systems.Conceptual metaphor is the summary and conclusion of metaphoric expression;a cognitive mechanism,a cognitive motivation of polysemy and semantic changes.It offers theoretic guidance for English language vocabulary teaching and learning.Currently the way students learn vocabulary is simply and traditionally to find out the Chinese equivalence corresponding to each English word and memorize it down,ignoring the interrelationship between the semantic items of each word.The students are bored in memorizing and using words,which in turn leads to interest in English and motivation to learn decline and erode away.Therefore,in practical vocabulary teaching,teachers should help students correctly understand the foundation and importance of metaphors,so as to effectively cultivate students' metaphorical awareness,strengthening word semantics in college English class.It is necessary for teachers and students to teach and learn vocabulary and embed conceptual metaphoric interrelation of vocabulary so as to improve the efficiency of vocabulary learning,memory and utilization.The study analyses the status quo of non-English majors' vocabulary,and incorporating the relevant theories of conceptual metaphor,briefly uses some comparative experiments between groups and interviewing method to explore the potential role of conceptual metaphor in vocabulary learning,to develop a metaphorical awareness of learning;to improve the efficiency of language vocabulary learning;to expand the relevant contents for vocabulary teaching and provide reference for non-English major English vocabulary teaching.The thesis is mainly divided into five parts: the first part is the introduction of the study;the second is to review the conceptual metaphorical theory and its application in college English vocabulary teaching and learning practice;the third is to cover the present situation of college English vocabulary teaching and learning for none-English majors;the fourth is to study the influence of the cultivation of metaphorical consciousness on students' vocabulary learning through intergroup comparative experiment and interview and demonstrate the integration of metaphor awareness into college English vocabulary learning effectively improve non-English majors' understanding of vocabulary and achieve holistic development;the fifth is the conclusion that the vocabulary teaching of method under the conceptual metaphor theory improve the efficiency of students' vocabulary learning and usage and reciprocally cultivate students' conceptual metaphorical thinking consciousness and competence.