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A Study of the Effectiveness of Applying Cognitive Metaphor Theory to College English Vocabulary Teaching

Author: GaoXiaoPing
Tutor: ZhaoYingLing
School: Northeast Normal University
Course: Foreign Linguistics and Applied Linguistics
Keywords: metaphor cognitive metaphor English vocabulary teaching
CLC: H319
Type: Master's thesis
Year: 2011
Downloads: 97
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Abstract

It has been more than 2,000 years since the beginning of metaphor study. The representative theories are Comparison Theory, Substitution Theory, Interaction Theory and Cognitive Theory. Both Aristotle’s Comparison Theory and Quintilian’s Substitution Theory hold that metaphor is an ornament, a deviance of language, chiefly for rhetoric or ornamental purpose. The Interaction Theory was first put forward by Richards, then developed by Black. With the publication of Lakoff and Johnson’s Metaphors We Live By in 1980, which was a milestone and a revolution in its field, metaphor study has been catching more and more attention mainly from a perspective of cognitive linguistics. Lakoff and Johnson claimed that metaphor is a cognitive process, which provide us with a new perspective to do some research on language and its teaching.Vocabulary is the foundation for any other language competence. In the traditional vocabulary teaching, the learners’study is mechanical, and they know little about the internal mechanism of the vocabularies. As human being’s important cognitive way, metaphor also serves as one of the important ways for language to develop, including vocabulary. In view of the close relationship between language and metaphor, the research tries to probe such questions as how much the college non-English majors know about metaphor, whether cognitive metaphor can facilitate college English vocabulary teaching and how cognitive metaphor can be utilized in English vocabulary teaching.Based on Cognitive Metaphor Theory, this paper first tests how much the non-English majors know about metaphor and their metaphorical competence on the word level. Then, by a ten-week teaching experiment, the author tries to probe how to apply Cognitive Metaphor Theory to college English vocabulary teaching, and verifies the effectiveness according to the experimental data. The contrast experiment is conducted among 64 clinical students with similar English levels from two natural classes in Grade 2009. It is composed of questionnaire survey, pretest, experimental teaching and posttests. CC and EC are taught with the same textbook, but different methods: the conventional English vocabulary teaching method and the new cognitive metaphor-added method. After the experiment, the author again tests their vocabulary level, metaphorical competence and comprehensive English ability. Eventually, through the statistical analysis by the software SPSS13.0, the author find that there are remarkable improvements in both vocabulary level and metaphorical competence in EC, compared with CC, which proves that it is effective to introduce Cognitive Metaphor Theory into college English vocabulary teaching. However, this doesn’t mean we’ll totally repudiate the traditional method, for it is only an effective supplement to the traditional method.

A Study of the Effectiveness of Applying Cognitive Metaphor Theory to College English Vocabulary Teaching

Abstract

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