Benefits Of Enhanced Metaphoric Awareness In Specialized Reading

Metaphor has played a fundamental role in daily thought and language, and can reflect shared cultural values and beliefs. Besides, metaphor enables us to recognize and comprehend the relatively abstract and disorganized concepts through relatively concrete and clear-cut concepts. It has also been an important language phenomenon that could not be overlooked in language learning.This thesis attempts to investigate whether better metaphoric awareness could help EFL students perform better in specialized reading, especially in-depth reading. Economic texts in The Economist were chosen as data for analysis. Major metaphoric themes used in these economic texts in this study were collected and categorized, and an original analysis was carried out to present authors' positions and other implied meanings as reflected from those commonly encountered metaphors. Despite that, a study was made to better prove the importance of enhanced metaphoric awareness. The results indicated that enhanced metaphoric awareness can help EFL learners have a better recognition of authors' opinions as well as some implied meanings, which could definitely help EFL students better understand certain concepts and expressions in the text, hence the whole article.