Application Of Conceptual Metaphor To Chinese Vocabulary Teaching In Junior High School In Thailand

Since Lakoff and Johnson first put forward “conceptual metaphor” in Metaphors We Live By,it have attracted the attention of linguists at home and abroad.At present,some domestic scholars have begun to study the application of conceptual metaphor in English teaching,focusing on the role of metaphorical awareness and metaphorical competence in vocabulary learning.So far,the empirical study which combines theoretical research with Chinese vocabulary teaching as a foreign language abroad isn't common.Taking a junior high school in Thailand as an example,an experimental class and a control class are selected in this school.The metaphorical vocabulary teaching method and the traditional vocabulary teaching method are adopted for three months respectively.In order to get the contrastive results of Chinese vocabulary learning,the questionnaires before and after the experiment,vocabulary pre-test and post-test are adopted.Thereafter,the collected data were analyzed with EXCEL 2007 and SPSS22.0.The author found that the experimental class is superior to the control class in vocabulary acquisition after the experiment,which shows that using metaphor theory to teach Chinese vocabulary can enhance students' learning interest and effectively improve their learning efficiency.To some extent,this study proves the potential application value of metaphor teaching method in CFL vocabulary teaching.Due to various factors involved in the experimental teaching process,there arestill many limitations in this study: 1)the application of metaphorical vocabulary teaching method requires researchers to have a deeper understanding of conceptual metaphor;2)the metaphorical vocabulary teaching method is not entirely suitable for every student;3)few students can not generate a large number of new metaphorical expressions after understanding.This will become a problem to be solved in the next research.