The Conceptual Metaphors In Teacher Talk Of Chinese And British Online Academic English Writing Courses: A Comparative Study

In 1980,Lakoff and Johnson proposed conceptual metaphor theory,dividing metaphor into three categories: structural metaphor,ontological metaphor and orientational metaphor.Nowadays,both contemporary metaphoric view and cognitive linguistics agree that metaphor has become an important cognitive way for human beings to understand the world and acquire knowledge.How teachers use metaphors in their class talk has an important influence on teaching effectiveness,especially in language class where teacher talk has double status: not only a tool of teaching communication,but also an important source for students to obtain comprehensible language input.Previous studies have shown that metaphor in teacher talk is well worth studying,in that it plays a crucial role in teaching: metaphor can make use of common experience foundations between teachers and students to build a bridge between teachers' rational knowledge and students' existing knowledge so students can understand meanings of abstract concepts accurately.Besides,teachers can improve the quality of teacher talk to provide students with better comprehensible input.Moreover,with the help of metaphor,teacher talk will become richer,more vivid and interesting,which will stimulate the imagination of learners,attract students' attention,further promote second language acquisition and improve teaching efficiency.Since metaphor in teacher talk has such important functions in foreign language teaching,it is worth studying what characteristics Chinese teachers have in using metaphor.According to Cameron(2008)and Littlemore(2014),metaphor density is the proportion of metaphors in language.It is positively related with metaphoric competence,including the understanding for metaphors and the ability to autonomously produce metaphors.They find that metaphor density in university teaching discourse can reveal characteristics of teachers in using metaphor and further point out the importance of metaphoric competence of teachers in promoting language teaching.Therefore,many scholars have made researches on the metaphor density(Sun Ya,2013;He Zhongqing,2016;He Bingyan,2014).However,at present,the related study is mainly based on the data from reading and oral English class,while writing class is rarely involved.This paper therefore aims to make a contrastive analysis on metaphor densities of teacher talk in Chinese and British academic English writing online courses,to reveal the similarities and differences of metaphor uses between Chinese and British teachers,find out the reasons leading to the differences,and provide some suggestions for Chinese teachers to improve their metaphor uses.Research questions in this research are shown as following:1)What is the overall metaphor density in teacher talk?2)What are the densities of different types of metaphors in teacher talk and how are metaphors distributed in different types of teacher talk?3)What are the reasons leading to similarities and differences of metaphor uses between Chinese and British teachers?This research takes teacher talk of ten British and Chinese teachers from three online academic English writing courses(two from Chinese University MOOC and one from Futurelearn)as research sources,employs MIP by Pragglejaz Group(2007)to identify metaphors.Quantitative method is adopted in this dissertation to figure out the overall density of metaphors in teacher talk,the densities of three different metaphors(structural metaphor,ontological metaphor,and orientational metaphor)in teacher talk,and metaphor densities in different types of teacher talk(organization,question,instruction,and explanation).Statistics of British and Chinese teachers are compared and the reasons of the differences are explored.The findings are concluded as following:(1)On the whole,both Chinese and British teachers use conceptual metaphor in their talk because of its universality and its unique function in teaching.However,language proficiency is positively correlated with metaphoric competence.British teachers' metaphoric competence is higher than Chinese teachers leading to the fact that the overall metaphor density of British teachers is higher than that of Chinese teachers.(2)The structural metaphor density in teacher talk of British teachers is higher while the ontological metaphor density in teacher talk of Chinese teachers is higher.The reason may be that the generation and understanding of structural metaphor are more complex and the requirements for language proficiency and cross-cultural awareness are higher,while the construction and understanding of ontological metaphor are relatively simple and the requirements for Chinese teachers' language proficiency and cross-cultural awareness are relatively low.The orientational metaphor density in teacher talk of both Chinese and British teachers is low in that the construction and understanding of orientational metaphor are mostly related to orientation words and its scope of use is limited.(3)Among different types of teacher talk,the metaphor density in instruction of Chinese teachers is higher than that of British teachers while the metaphor density in explanation of British teachers is higher than that of Chinese teachers.The reason may be that Chinese and British teachers adopt quite different teaching beliefs.First,Chinese teachers attach more importance to instruction compared with British teachers.This is reflected from two facts: the proportion of Chinese teacher's instruction in teacher talk is larger and the content is more specific.In order to ensure that students can fully understand the meaning of instruction,Chinese teachers may use more metaphors in instruction.Secondly,British and Chinese teachers treat explanation in quite different ways.In the process of explaining some difficult content,Chinese teachers tend to present most what they talk on slides,which can be easily followed by students.However,British teachers like presenting an outline on slides and elaborating on it with their own words and experiences.In that case,their explanation may be difficult for second language learners to follow.To make students understand their explanation better,British teachers may use more metaphors in their explanation.As for organization and question,because organization has fixed form and question is used rarely in online courses,the metaphor densities in organization and question of Chinese and British teachers are both quite low.Based on the analysis above,this research presents the following implications for further promotion of English teaching: Chinese teachers should improve theirmetaphoric competence by improving their metaphoric awareness and cross-cultural awareness so as to improve teaching efficiency and provide comprehensible input with better quality for students.