A Study Of Spanish Middle School Students’ Beliefs About Chinese Learning Based On Elicited Metaphor Analysis

Through the study we classified the beliefs about learning Chinese into four categories according to the positive degree of the metaphors,which are positive,negative,neutral and ambivalent;according to the content and significance into six categories,which are discovery,process,skills,emotions,extreme events and tools.Among them,discovery and process have the largest number of metaphors,accounting for 29.07%and 19.77%of the total effective answers respectively.Besides that,the beliefs also change with the increase of learning time.Based on the above data and its changing trend,we,under the guidance of"learning is travelling",classical conceptual metaphors of Lakoff(1993),built a specific model of Spanish middle school students’ beliefs about learning Chinese:learning Chinese is travelling in another world.We also compared with previous studies of Chinese students’language learning beliefs and found that Spanish middle school students pay more attention to emotional experience in the learning process,and it never appeared in the studies of Chinese students.Finally,based on the research results,this paper summarizes some inspirations and teaching suggestions,so as to help teachers,especially the Chinese teachers who teach in Spanish secondary schools,prepare the class more pertinently and solve the existing problems in teaching and learning.