Contextual Effect On The Acquisition Of The Metaphorical Uses Of Polysemous Words

Lexical acquisition is considered as the central task in Second Language Acquisition (SLA). And some researches show that context plays an important role in vocabulary acquisition, especially Incidental Vocabulary Acquisition (IVA), and there is contextual effect on lexical access. Since polysemy constructs a major part for daily used lexicons, whose derived meanings are mainly of metaphorical uses, we consider the acquisition of metaphorical uses of polysemous words as the centre of lexical acquisition. This thesis has addressed two questions: How does the context help in comprehending the metaphorical uses of polysemous words? To what extent will the level of difficulty of context best help the learner acquire the metaphorical uses of polysemous words? Based on the two questions we conducted a survey: the subjects are 82 Juniors who are majoring in English (36 are from University of Shanghai for Science and Technology who take Questionnaire One; 46 come from ShanDa University who take Questionnaire Two and the Reading Comprehension Test) through random sampling. The results show that the adjustment of the context do exert influence on the comprehension to the metaphorical uses of polysemous words (both lexical and functional), in which the so-called appropriate ones (i.e. the contexts which are no more difficult than the current understanding level of the subjects and which are more familiar to them) are more helpful. On the basis of the above findings, in the end, we offer some suggestions for EFL lexical teaching, learning and testing.