A Study Of The Correlation Between Metaphoric Competence And Depth Of Vocabulary Knowledge Of High School Students

In this thesis, metaphor is mainly researched from the perspective of cognitive linguistics. It is pointed out that metaphor is a cognition means instead of a traditional rhetoric device. The essence of metaphor is conceptual, and new linguistic meanings can be constructed through metaphor. While as the basis of constructing the metaphor, vocabulary is the carrier of concept and culture. Therefore, metaphor can enhance and improve people’s cognition abilities and linguistic abilities. Since the concept "Metaphoric Competence" came up, metaphoric competence has been considered the higher requirement for second language learners, combining with linguistic competence and communicative competence. For a long time, domestic scholars have been trying to find out the frame for applying metaphor theory to second language acquisition. However, compared to the theoretical researches on metaphor, empirical studies on it are quite rare, not to mention the studies on the correlation between metaphoric competence and lexical acquisition. If any, the subjects of most empirical studies are college students, and do not include high school students, who should be the main body in constructing the basic concept during the process of vocabulary learning.For this reason, this thesis theoretically discusses the correlation between metaphor and vocabulary acquisition, especially depth of vocabulary knowledge, and then empirically probes into the correlation between metaphoric competence and depth of vocabulary knowledge of high school students. Thus,140 high school students respectively from regular class in senior one, honors class in senior one, regular class in senior two and honors class in senior two have been chosen as subjects. Meanwhile using the quantitative methodology, the author has designed metaphoric competence test papers and depth of vocabulary knowledge test papers. After that, SPSS 16.0 is employed to deal with the collected data. The findings are as follows:1) On the whole, in terms of both metaphoric competence and depth of vocabulary knowledge, they are at low level, although the mean value of senior two is a bit higher than that of senior one.2) Overall, the correlation between them does exist both in senior one and senior two, but the correlation coefficient is a litter higher in senior two than in senior one.3) Among three aspects of metaphoric competence, there is comparatively significant correlation between metaphoric comprehension ability and depth of vocabulary knowledge, no correlation between metaphoric interpretation ability and depth of vocabulary knowledge and low correlation between metaphoric production ability and depth of vocabulary knowledge.Based on the above findings, the author points out that metaphoric competence is a key factor of influencing the depth of vocabulary knowledge. Therefore, it is of necessity to enhance the cultivation of metaphoric competence so as to improve students’depth of vocabulary knowledge. In addition, some strategies about how to cultivate students’ metaphoric competence have been put forward so as to instruct the vocabulary teaching in high school.