Effects Of Conceptual Metaphor-based Polysemy Teaching On Chinese EFL Learners’ Polysemous Mental Representation Development

Polysemy is a universal phenomenon in natural languages. In foreign languageteaching and learning, polysemy has always been an important part and also adifficult part, because influenced by traditional linguistic researches, polysemicsenses are considered to be no correlation and unsystematic. Traditional vocabularyteaching is not effective for EFL learners to learn polysemy. Rote and repetition isjust a time-consuming and low-effective way. Besides, some studies find that the wayto guess the polysemic senses by context is not so effective as what people thought.Importantly, it can not contribute to long-term memorization.When Lakoff&Johnson (1980) put forward the theory of conceptual metaphor,researchers began to pay attention to investigate the cognitive correlation betweenwords and between polysemic senses. Meanwhile, they have made some theoreticalanalysis and empirical studies, and they have found that improving learners’metaphorical awareness can promote vocabulary acquisition. However, no relativeresearches probe the different influences on learners’ mental representation thattraditional vocabulary teaching and conceptual metaphor-based vocabulary teachinghave. Therefore, the present study is conducted to investigate the differentpolysemous mental representations of Chinese EFL learners from different Englishproficiency groups receiving two different polysemy teaching methods.Based on the theory of conceptual metaphor, this thesis, mainly choosing thenoun, verb and adjective polysemy as the experimental materials, carried out anempirical study upon the students of four natural classes from Chengdu ShuangliuMiddle School. They are separately from two classes of the third grade students ofjunior school (the low English proficiency group) and two classes of the third gradeof senior high school (the high English proficiency group). One class of each Englishproficiency group is control class, and the other is experiment class. The controlclasses are taught with the traditional polysemy teaching method, while the experiment classes are instructed with the conceptual metaphor-based polysemyteaching method. This thesis mainly investigates the following three researchquestions:⑴Are there significant differences in the polysemous mental representationdevelopment between subjects receiving the conceptual metaphor-basedpolysemy instruction and subjects receiving the traditional polysemyinstruction?⑵Are there significant differences in the polysemous mental representationdevelopment between subjects from the higher English proficiency groupand subjects from the lower English proficiency group?⑶Do teaching method and English proficiency have interactive effects onChinese EFL learners’ polysemous representation development？After the instruction experiment and post-test, SPSS16.0is applied to analyzethe relative data. The statistical results arrive at the following conclusions:⑴There is a significant difference (F=26.5, P=.000<0.05) in the polysemousmental representation development between subjects receiving theconceptual metaphor-based polysemy instruction and subjects receiving thetraditional polysemy instruction.⑵There is a significant difference (F=426.108, P=.000<0.05) in the polysemousmental representation development between subjects from the higherEnglish proficiency group and subjects from the lower English proficiencygroup.⑶Teaching method and English proficiency produce interactive effect on thepolysemous representation development (F=4.77, P=.000<0.05).⑷The understanding of the metaphorical relations among polysemic sensescan strengthen memorization with senses increase and contribute to theprocessing and retrieving of senses.