An Evaluation Of Business English:A Reading Course Based On Metaphor Use

Metaphor,in essence,is a cognitive phenomena.It is indispensable in filling terms in one language that does not have a counterpart in another language.To foreign language learners,metaphor learning and use can be served as a measurement to one’s foreign language competence.This thesis is a evaluation of Business English:A Reading Course(BERC)based on its metaphor use.It tries to answer the following three questions:1)Is the main content(Text A&B)of the target coursebooks Business English:A Reading Course(Book 1-4)related to business and economy?2)What business and economy-related linguistic metaphors do the target coursebooks contain?Do these linguistic metaphors contain language knowledge,business knowledge and cultural knowledge that business&economy English students need?3)Do these linguistic metaphors in the target coursebooks represent the commonly used conceptual metaphors that construct common business and economy topics?With these three research questions in mind,based on Lakoff&Johnson’s conceptual metaphor theory,this thesis adopt qualitative and quantitative methods to classify and analyze the collected business and economy related metaphorical expressions draw from the 128 texts(153534 words)in BERC.MIPVU is applied to identify linguistic metaphor and Wmatrix(3.0)(Rayson,2011)is used to identify semantic domain.the following conclusions are drawn:1)Linguistic statistic shows that there are 41 business and economy related words among the top 100 saliently overused keywords in BERC.36 out of 41 are included in the business&economy English keywords list classified by Nelson(2000).The rest 5 can also be categorized into business&economy English after examination.It can be concluded that the main context of the target coursebooks relates to business and economy.Coursebooks satisfy foreign language learners’ needs and conform to National Curriculum for BA Program in Business English of China.2)After search of the 41 keywords and their other grammatical forms,2020 index lines were extracted.MIPVU(Steen et al.2010)was applied to identify metaphorical expressions in the index lines,which resulted 268 linguistic metaphors related to business and economy,including 229 generic-level linguistic metaphors(86%),22 genre specific linguistic metaphors(8%)and 17 image metaphors(6%).The three types of metaphor provide language knowledge,business knowledge and cross-cultural knowledge for learners who study foreign language through business&economy English.Among the three types of metaphor,generic-level linguistic metaphor takes up a much greater percentage(86%)than genre specific linguistic metaphors and image metaphor.It indicates that BERC belongs to EGBP and therefore satisfies the needs of beginners,which complies with the teaching materials compilation principle.3)The target domain of the conceptual metaphors in the target coursebooks is the cognitive domain reflected in business keywords,namely[Business].After semantic annotation procedure,the most frequently used source domains include Movement,Measurement,Buildings,Quantities and Travel.These conceptual metaphors belong to commonly used ones that construct the common business and economy topic.Therefore,target coursebooks provided effective metaphor input and satisfy the Curriculum.