A Study Of The Effects Of Experiential Teaching On College English Learners’ Metaphorical Competence

Metaphors may be seen as one of the greatest and most potential capabilities for human cognition.Once the reformation of the College English Syllabus gets underway in 2020,English teaching for college students pay close attention to learners’ metaphorical competence.Meanwhile,a growing group of scholars at home and abroad have verified the embodied nature of metaphor by taking a stance on a series of disciplines,ranging from philosophy,psychology,and linguistics to neurology.However,the existing experimental studies on the cultivation of L2learners’ metaphorical competence have failed to pay attention to the embodied nature of metaphor.Thus,there is an urgent need for new teaching approaches or models that are a true representation of the links between the growth of metaphorical ability and access to experiencing reality.Experiential teaching involves a learner-centered and experience-based continuous process,the goal of which is to equip learners to adapt to the world by placing them in a continuum of interaction between individuals,reality,and experience.Such instruction is not only primarily concerned with concrete experience and reflective observation but also has paid close attention to abstract conceptualization and active practice,which Kolb called Experiential Teaching Circle(ELC).Motivated by embodied cognitive linguistics and conceptual metaphor theory both of which acknowledge that embodied experience points to an important role for metaphor,this enquiry aims to the following two questions: 1)Does experiential teaching influence college English learners’ metaphorical competence in identification,understanding,and production? If so,what effects does experiential teaching exert on the three dimensions of metaphorical competence of college English learners? 2)Which aspect of metaphorical competence can be influenced the most by experiential teaching,identification,understanding,or production? This research will select two parallel classes of students in grade two from a university in Chongqing as test-takers.One class constitutes the experimental group instructed by experiential teaching,while the other class serves as the control group guided by the traditional PPP(PresentationProduction-Practice)model.This research will adopt the format of the Metaphorical Competence Test(MCT)designed by Littlemore for evaluating learners’ competence in metaphor.The whole experiment is organized around six conceptual metaphors over a two-month period.Two metaphorical competence tests on both the experimental group and the control group are administered before and after the teaching experiment.After the teaching experiment,there is an oral interview for 15 minutes which is directed at six learners randomly selected only from the experimental group.Derived from the analysis results on the samples,three general observations are made.First,experiential teaching has a notable effect on college English learners’ competence in metaphor recognition,metaphor understanding,and metaphor output.Secondly,experiential teaching can help learners to achieve a heightened competence in metaphor recognition,metaphor comprehension,and metaphor production;it has a more significant impact on the identification of implicit metaphors than explicit metaphors and brings about more improvement in conceptual metaphor understanding than metaphorical expression interpreting.Thirdly,experiential teaching has the greatest impact on metaphor interpretation ability.This research is significant both theoretically and practically.From a theoretical standpoint,it allows us to close the research gaps in the field of metaphor teaching by the contribution it makes to the salience of the experiential nature of metaphor.From the pedagogical perspective,it affords a body of advice to instructors about how to conduct a reasonable,efficient,and operable metaphor class.