Cognitive Approach To Metaphor Understanding Of EFL Learners In English Reading

The systematic study of metaphor has experienced several periods since Aristotle and his Rhetoric. Traditionally, metaphor is just a linguistic phenomenon, regarded as a figure of speech. It is decorative and ornament in nature. However, in the past few decades, the situation has undergone a radical change. The publication of Lakoff and Johnson's book Metaphors We Live By (1980) leads to the further understanding to the nature of metaphor in a cognitive perspective. Metaphor is viewed as a figure of thought (Lakoff, 1986). The term metaphor has come to mean"a cross-domain mapping in the conceptual system"(Lakoff, 1993). In this way, metaphor is in effect ubiquitous in everyday language and thought.In the process of EFL learning, Chinese learners of English meet metaphors in English inevitably and frequently. However, due to the contradictory, provisional and implicit features, the explanations to metaphors can be neither found in the dictionary, nor derived from the literal meanings mechanically. The metaphors need the maximal subjective involvement of learners to infer the applied meanings of the metaphors and the intentions of the authors. Consequently, some metaphors result in comprehension difficulty in English reading for learners—the learners are familiar with individual words with their literal meanings while cannot make sense of them when the words are in certain contexts.In order to explore the difficulty of EFL learners in metaphor understanding in English reading and the reasons for the difficulty, to further improve their understanding ability on metaphor, an empirical research for 100 English learners was conducted. By paper-testing, interviewing and final analyzing, the paper drew that Chinese learners of English indeed have difficulty in understanding some metaphors and the similar difficulty is reflected from different groups of intermediate English learners. Meanwhile, in terms of different types of metaphors, metaphor with the source domain is not difficult for EFL learners because those conceptual metaphors used to prompt the metaphor understanding are always universal based on human's life experience. However, there are different degrees of difficulty in understanding the other three types of metaphors. The difficulty is partly from the metaphor itself because the mapping of the metaphor is complicated or covert or similarity-creating. Still part of the difficulty is due to the intercultural difference which is reflected in metaphorical expressions. And other part of difficulty is from the poor comprehension ability of learners.