| English idioms are an indispensable part of English and the good command of them is a symbol of native-like use of English. For EFL Chinese learners, English idioms are one of the difficulties in their English study. The view that the meanings of the idioms are non-compositional is widely shared in the traditional studies on idioms. Yet Cognitive Linguistics suggests that conceptual motivation can provide a very good way for the semantic explanation of English idioms. Therefore, it may provide an effective approach for English idiom teaching.This thesis is based on Lakoff's Conceptual Metaphor Theory. It provides an empirical study of the effects and strategies of teaching conceptual metaphor on university- level Chinese EFL learners'idiom learning. The present study included a questionnaire before the pretest, a pretest, idiom instruction, a classroom-test, a post-test and a questionnaire after the post-test. 50 first-year non-English major students from two classes participated. One class was the experimental group; the other was the control group. The experiment was conducted for a whole term with the metaphorical approach of teaching English idioms in experimental group under a comparison with a traditional approach in the control group. Questionnaires, test papers and THINK—ALOUD protocols were used to gather the data; Independent Sample T-test and Paired T-test were employed for statistical analysis. Through the interpretation of the quantitative and qualitative results, the following conclusions can be generated.Firstly, the application of conceptual metaphor can facilitate the teaching and learning of English idioms by incorporating conceptual metaphor knowledge and cultivating learners'metaphorical competence. Students from the experimental group outscored the students from the control group both in the classroom-test and the post-test.Secondly, conceptual metaphors are found to work as an effective processing strategy. Students from the experimental group apply more metaphorical knowledge than students from the control group when processing English idioms and the accuracy is also higher.Thirdly, presentation modes foster processing accuracy. The processing accuracy is higher for idioms presented in context than in isolation. Both groups benefit a lot from the presence of idioms in a context situation. Fourthly, motivation for the meaning of idioms can produce better results than a lack of motivation in the learning of idioms. Conceptual metaphor working together with image schema is more effective in teaching orientational metaphorical idioms than the traditional semantic method. The positive results are obtained from the classroom- test.Based on the above conclusions, some pedagogical implications of the findings are also discussed. |
