| As we all know, as far as foreign language is concerned, reading is an essentialability to develop, which so far is the most important skill of the four basic languageskills like listening, speaking, reading and writing. To improve students’ readingability is one of the objectives of senior English teaching. Researchers and Englishteachers have long been concerned about how to improve students’ English readingability.Analyzing from the materials that we have got, we can see that in China,researches on how to improve students’ reading comprehension are mostly from theperspective of reading strategies training such as metacognition, vocabularyknowledge (in breadth and depth) and Task-based Language Approach. There are fewresearches on reading comprehension from the perspective of cognitive linguistics,especially conceptual metonymy. A few relevant researches mainly make the collegestudents as the subjects. It is rare to make middle school students as the subjects. Butafter Lakoff and Johnson’s study, it has been believed that metonymy has a positiveeffect on EFL reading. Therefore, the author applied the theory of conceptualmetonymy to the empirical study of the effect of conceptual metonymic competenceon middle school students’ English reading comprehension.This empirical study tries to get the answers to the following questions:1. What isthe effect of metonymy knowledge teaching on students’ metonymic competence?2.Is there any relationship between students’ awareness of metonymy knowledge useand their reading ability?3. What is the effect of metonymic competence training onstudents’ reading ability?To answer these three questions, the author conducts a15-week empiricalinvestigation. About100students from2classes in Grade2of Haotou Senior HighSchool of Zhongshan City were chosen as the subjects for this study. In the first week,Pre-test for metonymic competence and reading comprehension was carried out. Then,it took12weeks for the author to carry out the experimental teaching period. Post-testfor metonymic competence and reading comprehension was arranged in the14thweek. In the15thweek, the author interviewed a few students in the experimental group. Thescores of the subjects in the pre-test and post-test were checked by IndependentSamples Test and Paired Samples T-test through SPSS16.0.It can be discovered that in the pre-test, both EG and CG’s metonymiccompetence and English reading comprehension of the students is at the same levelthat is very low. However, the results of the post-test show that EG students madegreater significant progress than the CG students in the aspect of metonymiccompetence and reading comprehension. The result of interview indicates that the EGstudents tried to enhance their reading ability with the help of metonymic analysis oflanguage.The following conclusion can be drawn: the students’ metonymic competenceand interest in English and reading can be enhanced by teaching metonymyknowledge; meanwhile, the students’ reading proficiency can be improved as well.And consequently, the theory of conceptual metonymy is feasible to be applied toEnglish reading class of senior high school.Based on the study, some valuable pedagogical implications for English readingcomprehension have been proposed. |
