The Application Of Metaphor In English Teaching

This thesis which focuses on the issue of metaphor teaching demonstrates the feasibility and necessity of metaphor teaching in English curriculum from a theoretical point of view and explores how to effectively implement metaphor teaching methods on English skills curriculum from a practical point of view. Metaphor is a universal phenomenon of language which has been studied for more than two thousand years. Traditional metaphor research considers metaphor as a particular figure of speech, and an ornament to language. However, with further research, contemporary theories regard metaphor as a cognitive tool, as the way of people’s thought and action, as an important tool for language development. Metaphor is the cognitive tool and language system is a cognitive system, and this perspective has been gradually accepted.Language is closely connected with the cognition of people, therefore metaphor should not peel off from English teaching and learning. In recent years, some scholars began to study metaphor in the field of applied linguistics, that is the applied research in language teaching, which is considered to be an important research topic and direction. The research of this thesis is just based on this. From this point of view, this thesis studies the relationship among metaphor, English language and metaphor teaching. The application in English teaching practice has a realistic sense.Adopted the main point of contemporary metaphor theory, this thesis emphasizes the importance of the cultivation of metaphor competence in teaching process, and the key of metaphor competence is conceptual fluency. The three core elements of language are pronunciation, vocabulary and grammar. The basic skills of language include listening, speaking, reading, writing and translating. Based on this, the author tries to apply metaphor teaching to the teaching of vocabulary, speaking, culture, reading, writing and listening. Through this process, the author expects to inject new vitality to Chinese college English education. But it should be noted that this thesis is just a preliminary study of metaphor teaching, more feasible and practical metaphor teaching remains to be further studied.