A Study Of The Correlation Between Metaphoric Competence And English Writing Proficiency Of English Majors

Cognitive theory explains that metaphors are not only in language, but in thoughtand action. Therefore, metaphors play a quite important role in the process oflanguage learning. Many scholars both at home and abroad have done a lot ofresearches and analysis from different perspectives. However, most of the studies arejust about the theory itself, and at home, as the study of metaphoric competencedeveloped later, the studies about metaphoric competence are still less, especially thestudy of the correlation between metaphoric competence and English writingproficiency is rarely seen, either.This study aims to investigate the correlation between MC and writingproficiency. There are totally seventy English majors taking part in the test. Theinstruments include the composition of TEM8and the Metaphoric Competence Testwhich was adopted from Littlemore’s Metaphoric Competence Test. The former isused to measure the students’ writing proficiency and the latter is used to the test thestudents’ metaphoric competence. According to the results, the mainly findings are asfollows:(1) The scores of English-majors’ metaphoric competence test present anormal distribution but it shows a relative low level, which means that the Englishmajors’ metaphoric competence is not high.(2) The English-majors’ metaphoriccompetence and their writing proficiency are positively correlated to each other, which means that the learners’ writing proficiency has close relation with metaphoriccompetence.The findings of this thesis have some positive inspiration to English writingteaching and learning. Teachers should enrich the students’ metaphoric knowledgeand cultivate their metaphoric sense and metaphoric competence. Students should putthe metaphoric knowledge into the process of their study and then improve thestudents’ English proficiency.