A Study Of Application Of Metaphorical Culture In VTC English Teaching

With the acceleration of social information and economic globalization, the importance of English is increasingly highlighted. Since it is the most universally-used language around the world, English not only works as a means of communication, but also an essential skill in China. Most of colleges and universities, however, still follow the traditional education mode, focusing on the accumulation of basic knowledge, such as English vocabulary, grammar and sentence patterns. This kind of teaching mode could be beneficial to students in terms of passing exams while it leads to reduction of students’ learning interests to some extent. The further consequence is that their ability of innovation and initiative could hardly be stimulated. Besides pronunciation, vocabulary, grammar and sentence patterns, it is vitally necessary to learn the corresponding metaphorical culture as well as try to make it for real use, which is contributed to language competence. Language and metaphorical culture are intertwined and interacted, for metaphor intersects in linguistic and cultural phenomenon. To some extent, metaphor mirrors culture, which restricts metaphorical thinking in turn.In recent years, most of the studies concentrate on conceptual metaphor and culture teaching in university and middle school English teaching; however, there are few researches on metaphorical culture in vocational and technical colleges (short for VTC hereafter) English teaching, for which is a brand-new perspective in research.The research is carried out on the focus of the following questions to fulfill the general purposes:1. As an important component of language, what’s the relationship between metaphorical culture and language learning? 2. In order to achieve the aims of language learning, is it vital to make clear that how to apply metaphorical culture to English teaching in vocational and technical colleges? 3. How to cultivate students’ metaphorical thinking competence through the application of metaphorical culture?Based on George Lakoff and Mark Johnson’s Conceptual Metaphor and Zhao Weisen’s Metaphorical Culturology, the teaching experiment is designed and undertaken in Vocational and Technical Institute of Northwest University.80 sophomores specializing in Computerized Accounting are selected as the research subjects, who are divided into the control class and the experimental class. The research is based on the text book New Hope College English published by Northwest University. To verify students’English proficiency, all participants take part in pretests at the beginning of the semester. In the experimental period, the teaching and learning of metaphorical culture knowledge is undertaken in the experimental class, while the traditional teaching concept and method are carried out in the control class. At the end of the semester, all research subjects take the posttests and the experimental data is collected and analyzed by means of quantitative analysis and comparative analysis. The research result indicates that the subjects in the experimental class where metaphorical culture has been adopted and applied possess better English proficiency and their interests in English learning is higher than those of the control class. Meanwhile, it proves that the perception of more metaphorical culture is beneficial to improve learners’ metaphorical thinking and cross-cultural communication competence. Therefore, the researcher expects that the research result can provide effective and constructive reference for foreign language teaching in VTC.This thesis consists of six parts, namely, the introduction, literature review, the theoretical framework, the application research of metaphorical culture on English teaching in VTC, data collection and analysis and the final conclusion and additional recommendations.