A Study On The Application Of Conceptual Metaphor Theory To The English Vocabulary Teaching In The Middle Schools

Vocabulary is an important part of English teaching as well as a foundation for middle school students to learn English.Objectively speaking,the English language has a very large vocabulary and complex semantic changes,so vocabulary teaching has always been regarded as a difficult point in middle school English teaching.Subjectively speaking,there are many misconceptions about vocabulary,which leads to some negative effects of English vocabulary teaching.Aiming for this kind of condition,some linguists and English teachers begin to explore new methods of vocabulary teaching,such as the combination of conceptual metaphor and English vocabulary teaching.That is to say,teachers can carry out the teaching of English vocabulary under the theory of conceptual metaphor.Metaphor is not just a language phenomenon but also cognitive means,which plays an important role in the process of vocabulary evolution,and once the metaphorization of a word is admitted and used widely,it is to become a new item of a word and the word is likely to become polysemy.Therefore,most of the polysemous words are not created at random,but are organized due to themetaphorical usage of our language.On the basis of the above theories,an experiment is designed to study the effect of the application of conceptual metaphor to English vocabulary teaching in middle school.For this purpose,the author makes an empirical study in two parallel classes in Grade 8 of Kunshan Second Middle School for 3 months.In experimental class,the author teaches English vocabulary based on the conceptual metaphor,but in control class,the author takes the traditional vocabulary teaching method.Before the experiment,pre-test is given to the students in both experimental class and control class.The result shows that the students in these two classes are at the same level on English vocabulary.And at the end of this term,students are tested again to examinethe effects of conceptual metaphor teaching on English vocabulary.After analyzing the data by SPSS22.0,the result shows that the mean score in the experimental class is higher than that in the control class.Therefore,it can be concluded that conceptual metaphor can guide English vocabulary teaching in middle school,as it can help students understand English vocabulary better and use them more flexibly.There are also many shortcomings in this paper,mainly in the limited survey samples and experimental time.In addition,the thesis puts forward some suggestions on the future study.The first to do as much as possible is to increase the test object to ensure the reliability of test data.And then,great emphasis should be put on the effects of conceptual metaphor in other aspects besides vocabulary teaching.It is hoped that the future researches can make up for the deficiency in this paper,and discover more functions of conceptual metaphor.