A Cognitive Approach To College Students' Metaphorical Competence Of English And Its Motivating Factors

With the development of cognitive linguistics, metaphor is not only treated as amethod of rhetoric, it is the way of thinking, and the tool and result of human recognition ofthe world. Metaphorical competence refers to the ability to reflect concepts or decodeconcepts following the organizations of conceptual metaphors. Lacking metaphoricalcompetence leads to conceptual errors of language learners, for Chinese college students,they convey Chinese concepts by using English words and structures while communicatingin English, which sounds fluent but not idiomatic, thus they were misunderstood.Researches into metaphorical competence can help perfect learners' conceptual fluency, andlanguage teaching will be more efficient.The study divided metaphorical competence into metaphorical awareness,metaphorical comprehension, and metaphorical creativity, and the study arrived at aconclusion that learning strategies and cognitive styles are the main motivating factors. Acase study was carried out to reveal the traits of college students' metaphorical competenceand the motivating factors; tests on metaphorical competence and frequencies of use oflearning strategies were conducted, and participants' cognitive styles tendencies weredefined by a computed-based test. The result of the tests and the analyses showed,1. The participants have the awareness of conceptual metaphor and the ability ofmetaphorical comprehension. They are aware of orientational metaphors, but not sensitiveto ontological metaphors. They performed better in understanding primary metaphors thanunderstanding complex metaphors. They performed worse in test on metaphorical creativityand they cannot create proper metaphors since the created metaphors are translations of thesame Chinese conceptual metaphors.2. The participants' metaphorical competence has correlations with the frequencies ofuse of learning strategies. The frequency of use related to cognitive strategies has an impacton metaphorical creativity, and that of memory-related strategies also has influence onparticipants' metaphorical comprehension and creativity 3. The participants showed an obvious tendency of verbal cognitive style. Participantswho tend toward holistic style are more easily aware of conceptual metaphors, whileparticipants who tend to be analytic have a better understanding of conceptual metaphors.According to the results, the study proposed a comparative model of metaphoricalcompetence improvement, and designed concrete classroom activities for different contentsof teaching. The current study is a trail to researches into motivating factors of metaphoricalcompetence, and hopes that researchers will have an insight into metaphorical competenceconnected with the traditional issues in second language acquisition such as learningstrategies, and do the research from a multi-perspective.