Conceptual Metaphor Theory And Its Implications For College English Vocabulary Teaching

As one of three components of language, vocabulary plays a very important role in language teaching and learning. But in China, most English teachers only give much attention to the teaching of word pronunciation, formation and skills of memorization. They seldom pay attention to the comprehension of word meanings from cognitive view. Most students memorize vocabulary mechanically with unpleasant results. In order to change this situation, many researchers at home and abroad have tried to study the influence of metaphor on vocabulary teaching. Some scholars think that most words come from metaphorical way, and metaphor is an important process of word meanings’expanding and evolution.Traditionally, metaphor is regarded as a phenomenon of lexical rhetoric. But nowadays, many cognitive linguists think that metaphor is not only a linguistic phenomenon, but also a cognitive tool for us to perceive metaphorical conceptions. Metaphor is omnipresent in our daily life. The conceptual metaphor exists in our language, thinking and act. In the Conceptual Metaphor Theory, Lakoff and Johnson insist that the key point of metaphor is to perceive and experience one thing in one domain in terms of one in another domain. From their view, we know that metaphor is a tool of recognition and language is the production of recognition. Thus, Conceptual Metaphor Theory offers a new perspective to foreign language vocabulary teaching and learning. It’s very important and helpful for learners to learn foreign language vocabulary thoroughly, systematically and efficiently.In the thesis, first of all, the author offers the achievement of the studies on applying conceptual metaphor theory to FLVT home and abroad. Next, by discussing the framework of Conceptual Metaphor Theory and the relevant theories, the author shows the importance of applying conceptual metaphor in analyzing English polysemy and culture-loaded idioms. This also is the significance of study the relationship between Conceptual Metaphor Theory and foreign language vocabulary teaching and learning. Then, in order to test the actual level of Chinese non-English-major college students’English level on lexical level, the author designed and carried out a test to60subjects who are non-English-major sophomores. The results indicate that:1) college students have some metaphorical competence on foreign language vocabulary learning. But compared with their ability of metaphorical comprehension, their capability of metaphorical application is much lower. Both of the two competences need to improve;2) different personal thinking patterns, different cultural background and different metaphorical concepts between Chinese and English are the main factors that causing the difficulty in mapping the source domain to the target domain;3) students give a bad performance on application of metaphorical meanings of preposition, words used both as a noun and a verb and idioms. Based on the above analysis and relevant metaphorical theory, the conceptual metaphor-based approach of FLVT is put forward. As a supplement of traditional methods, it is believed that this approach will promote the development of FLVT and foster the improvement of students’ metaphorical competence and lexical capability.