Metaphor And Vocabulary Teaching

In today's China, English teaching has already become the basic part of school course. The foundation of English teaching is vocabulary teaching. Once here is a saying: "Learning English is just like building a construction while words are the bricks". However, the problem that confuses teachers and students is the application of the vocabulary teaching form. Traditionally, there are many methods, such as recitation, word-building analysis, and context inference, which can be of any help in remembering the meaning of words to some extent. But the main purpose of studying vocabulary is to apply the words vividly not just recite. For English in China is the second learning language, so it is lack of a sufficient language background. If the students are unable to apply the words to the daily communication or writing, it is a failure for vocabulary teaching.Metaphor is traditionally regarded as a rhetoric form that enriches human's language. It is commonly seen in poems. With the process and development of advanced researches on metaphor, people become to find out that metaphor is not only the component on word level, but the further level, human cognitive category. It is the basic routine that human thoughts obey. People use metaphor by trying to find out the resemblance between the two separate words, forming the new meaning. Metaphor is anywhere in human concept. As we all known, English vocabulary is in a process of changing. We see many new words every day. However, most of these new words are the old ones we are familiar with, they are given the new meanings. Metaphors contributes a lot to this change. Applying the metaphoric concept to the vocabulary teaching can make vocabulary teaching more vividly and direct. Students may become more active to find out the new meaning of the words to remember them and to apply them to writing and reading. Furthermore, metaphor has its abundant history and cultural background information, students can learn more knowledge during the vocabulary acquisition. The thesis introduces some influential theories of metaphor in the metaphor research history:the metaphoric theory of Aristotle; the Interaction Theory of Richards and Black; the Conceptual Metaphor of Lakoff. It also tries to analyze the development of English word-building, the advantages and disadvantages of the current vocabulary teaching forms to make it a try to apply the metaphoric concept to English word teaching, hoping that can let the students study words in a pleasant way.