A Study Of The Effects Of Conceptual Metaphor-Based Teaching On College English Phrasal Verbs Learning

English phrasal verbs learning plays an important role in college English vocabulary teaching.Students always encounter the problems,such as the difficulty of memory and the confusion of memory in the process of learning phrasal verbs.In recent years,with the development of cognitive linguistics,the idea of conceptual metaphor is gradually applied to the field of language teaching.In this thesis,we aims to apply the core ideas of conceptual metaphor theory to the teaching of phrasal verbs for the purpose of helping students improve their phrasal verbs proficiency,change their learning attitude,improve their learning strategy and enlarge their learning autonomy.Lakoff and Johnson put forward their conceptual metaphor theory.And Lakoff and Johnson claim that metaphor is a method of human beings thinking or cognitive process.The core of conceptual metaphor is that it is a cognitive activity mapping one specific domain onto the abstract domain.So conceptual metaphor is an instrument of human cognition.In fact,amount of expressions are closely related with conceptual metaphor.The application of conceptual metaphor theory has been drawing increasing attention in the field of applied linguistics.This thesis tries to answer the following questions:First,in what way(s)does the conceptual metaphor based vocabulary teaching affect the non-English majors’ phrasal verbs scores?Second,in what way(s)does the conceptual metaphor based vocabulary teaching affect the non-English majors’ interests and the use of strategy in phrasal verbs learning?Third,in what way(s)does the conceptual metaphor based vocabulary teaching affect the non-English majors’ phrasal verbs learning autonomy?There were 110 students from two classes of non-English majors in a university participating in a 16-week experiment.The research instruments include questionnaires,tests and interview.The purpose of the questionnaires is to answer the second question.The purpose of using tests is to answer the first question.The purpose of the interview is to answer the third research question.All the data will be analyzed by SPSS19.0.The results show that the conceptual metaphor based teaching on phrasal verbs has positive effects on the phrasal verbs proficiency,their learning interests and learning strategy.Moreover,it can also enlarge their learning autonomy about phrasal verbs.78% of students master the new method to change their attitude and improve their learning strategy after using the new teaching method guided by conceptual metaphor.It can be seen from the average score of the phrasal verbs test in the experimental class that the average score of the post-test(M=71.81)in the experimental class is obviously higher than the average score of the pre-test(M=60.48)in the experimental class.This shows that the new teaching method is effective in students’ phrasal verbs proficiency.