| Metaphor,as a complex linguistic phenomenon,the research of it can be traced back to the ancient Greek period,but it was not studied as a cognitive phenomenon until the second half of the 20 th century.Since then,metaphoric research has promptly attracted the attention of researchers at home and abroad,and has become one of the hottest topics in the field of cognitive linguistics.Linguists Lakoff and Johnson proposed in their book Metaphors We Live By that metaphor is not only a linguistic phenomenon,but also a thinking phenomenon and an important cognitive tool.Therefore,it is of theoretical and practical significance to study conceptual metaphor and cultivate students’ creative thinking ability while teaching and learning second language in college.In college English major teaching and learning process,the cultivation of oral ability is an important content,and how to improve oral ability has always been a major problem for English majors and their teachers.Compared with native English students,English majors in China tend to use simple and conservative words,which restrains their creativity and makes their oral expressions too straightforward,incoherent and in Chinese-style.Therefore,it is very important to cultivate students’ English metaphoric competence in order to improve their oral English.This thesis aims to study the use of metaphor in college TEM4-Oral and the relationship between metaphor use and students’ oral performance.The research is theoretically based on Lakoff and Johnson’s Conceptual Metaphor Theory.For the research data,this study establishes a new corpus of 96 transcripts randomly selected from the Spoken and Written English Corpus of Chinese Learners(Version 2.0)(SWECCL)created by Professor Wen Qiufang,Liang Maocheng and Yan Xiaoqin.By analyzing the conceptual metaphor used in each transcribing text in the new corpus,the using frequency of each metaphor type in the whole corpus was found out,after that whether and what kind of influence it had on students’ oral English test scores will be found out.After the research and analysis,it is found that conceptual metaphors can be detected in almost every transcript.In general,ontological metaphor is the mostfrequently used one among the three types of conceptual metaphors,while the other two types are less frequently used and their using frequency is relatively the same.Among them,“TIME IS A(N)COUNTABLE OBJECT” is the most frequently used ontological metaphor;“TIME IS MONEY” is the most frequently used structural metaphor and“HAVING CONTROL OR FORE IS UP,BEING SUBJECTED TO CONTROL OR FORCE IS DOWN” is the most frequently used orientational metaphor.In addition,through the comparative study of high-rank texts and low-rank texts,it can be found that the spoken language expressions with a high density and a wide variety of metaphors are more likely to be favored by teachers,thus get higher ranks.Therefore,the cultivation of metaphoric competence has a positive impact on improving the oral English test ranks of Chinese English majors,and teachers should strengthen the cultivation of students’ metaphoric competence in the process of oral English teaching. |
