A Study Of The Strategies In Metaphor Production And Comprehension By Chinese Senior High School Students

As a rhetorical and linguistic phenomenon,metaphor is pervasive,and its essence is to understand and experience one thing in terms of another(Lakoff & Johnson,2000).Since the 1980 s,metaphor,as one of the fundamental ways of the nature of human language and thinking pattern,has entered the field of second language acquisition.One of the hot topics of research is how metaphors are perceived and produced by second language learners.It is difficult for second language learners to process metaphors automatically as native speakers do,and they tend to adopt a non-automated mode even in processing conventional metaphors.Psycholinguistic research has shown that any non-automated language processing necessarily involves processing strategies in comprehension and production.Empirical studies at home and abroad indicate that second language learners can recognize and interpret metaphors,but the interpretative competence is inadequate.To date,researchers have not conclusively established the relationship between L2 learners’ metaphor use and their language proficiency due to differences in research subjects and methods.The current thesis combines a questionnaire survey,English-Chinese translation task,and metaphor comprehension task to explore the metaphor production competence and comprehension strategies of Chinese senior high school students of different levels.All data are collected via two studies:Study 1: Metaphor production strategy.Thirty subjects are chosen from Grade 3experimental classes as the high-level English learners and thirty from Grade 1non-experimental class as the low-level English learners,based on the Quick Placement Test results.The analysis of each variable in samples conducted by SPSS 18.0 shows that there exists significant difference between the two groups in their English proficiency(p< 0.01).A fill-in translation task,which consists of forty conventional metaphors,is employed to investigate the quality and quantity of metaphor production by participants of different levels.The related factors concerning participants’ English proficiency are also measured.Study 2: Metaphor comprehension strategy.60 senior high school students participating in the study are required to write down the corresponding meanings of the target metaphors and at the same time give a brief statement of the reasons why they understand them this way.Data are collected and analyzed to investigate the strategies that participants rely on in their metaphor comprehension,with the relationship between the English proficiency and the use of strategies considered.Based on the data analysis,we got the following findings.First,senior high school students are less capable in metaphor production than in metaphor comprehension them.Due to their low competence in metaphor production,learners cannot use metaphor to construct the conceptual system in the target language.The discourse they produce is discursively literal.Second,senior high school students adopt various strategies to express the target metaphor,such as regular expressions,incomplete expressions,L1 transfer,literal meaning,synonyms,and other English metaphors.Learners’ English proficiency has a significant effect on the strategies for metaphor production,and those of higher English proficiency tend to use more regular expressions,L1 transfer,and synonyms strategies,while those of lower English proficiency tend to use more incomplete expressions and literal meaning strategies.Third,the strategies used by senior high school students rank as sentence context,literal meaning,Chinese culture knowledge,English culture knowledge,guessing,the mental image and structure analysis according to frequency.Learners’ English proficiency has a significant effect on the strategies for metaphor comprehension.Learners of higher English proficiency prefer to use more sentence context,literal meaning and English cultural knowledge,while those of lower proficiency rely more on Chinese cultural knowledge,structure analysis,mental image,and guessing strategies to make up for their linguistic proficiency.There are no significant differences between the two groups in understanding metaphors with the same forms and concepts.However,the difference is significant in their comprehension of metaphors with the same language forms but different metaphorical concepts.By unveiling the factors that influence second language learners’ metaphor production and comprehension strategies,we have a better understanding of the ways how different cultures interacts with each other.Therefore,the findings exert some insights into metaphor teaching.