An Empirical Study On The Metaphorical Competence Cultivation Of Vocational College Students In English Reading Teaching

Metaphor is everywhere in language,so Language is metaphorical in nature.In early research,many experts put particular emphasis on metaphor's rhetorical effect on language.But with further research,researchers realized that metaphor is not only a cognitive cool,but also a means of life and thought of human beings.Gardner and Winner(1978)advance the concept of“metaphorical competence(MC)”,which is the ability to acquire,produce,and interpret metaphors in the target language.From the research route in the last decade abroad,we can know that most of studies on metaphorical competence were based on Conceptual Metaphor Theory(Lakoff&Johnson,1980).Researchers did research on metaphorical competence according to different research purposes.In recent years,many experts and scholars of our country realize the importance of metaphorical competence in foreign language studying,and advocate the idea to cultivate learners' metaphorical competence in foreign language teaching.Domestic researchers have done some studies on English teaching and metaphorical competence cultivation,such as ZhuYing(2009)did a study on the application of conceptual metaphor theory to teach reading in English reading of colleges,LiuNa(2010)did a research on the correlation between reading proficiency and metaphorical competence,CaoWenwen(2014)studied the effect of the conceptual metaphor on college English reading instruction;and so on.The results showed that students' metaphorical awareness and competence could be fostered in English comprehensive reading,and promoted English reading teaching to some extent.However,the studies mostly focused on English teaching of full-time college students,rarely on vocational college students.By means of the integration of metaphor ability training and reading comprehension teaching experiment on the non-English major students of Hunan Technical College of Railway High-speed,this paper endeavors to prove non-English major students,metaphorical competence is poor,explore the way to cultivate students' metaphorical competence in English reading teaching,and tries to study the positive effect that cultivating metaphorical competence exert on English reading teaching.The paper will explore how to cultivate students,metaphorical competence in English reading teaching as followings:1)What is the general picture of the students' metaphorical competence?2)How to cultivate students' metaphorical competence in English teaching reading?3)What effect does cultivating students' metaphorical competence have on English reading teaching of Vocational College?The subjects who have similar English levels were from first year non-English major grade one in their first semester.Both the controlled class and experimental classes have 30 students.The two classes had the same teaching hours and were taught by the same teacher.Before and after the experiment,all the students had tests of metaphor competence and reading ability.The experiment lasted for 12 weeks.The uncontrolled class used the regular textbooks,while the experimental class added to some teaching materials about metaphor.The results of the research showed that:1)Although vocational college non-English major students learn English over-depending on Chinese culture background,they can recognize metaphors certain context quickly.And the process of understanding is still astricted by their cultural background.2)Students' metaphorical competence can be trained in English teaching reading.In teaching reading,in order to help students widen metaphorical thought and realization,teachers should purposely lead students to analyze the metaphors and to get the deep cultures through surface linguistic phenomena.3)Cultivating students' metaphorical competence exerts a positive effect on English reading teaching.The study prove that vocational students,metaphorical competence can be cultivated in English reading teaching,arise the way to cultivate students' metaphorical competence,and find out cultivating students'metaphorical competence exerts a positive effect on English reading teaching.