The Application Of Conceptual Metaphor To English Vocabulary Teaching In Middle School

Vocabulary,as the basis for middle school English learning,plays a big part in student' s English performance.In foreign language teaching,vocabulary is the key and difficult part.Middle school English teachers believe that rote learning is the best way for students to learn vocabulary,which leads to the unsatisfactory effect of English vocabulary teaching.In response to this phenomenon,some linguists and English teachers began to experiment on various vocabulary learning methods,one of it is to establish a connection between metaphor and vocabulary teaching,and integrate metaphor into specific vocabulary teaching process.In spite of some success in the application to college English vocabulary learning,the use of conceptual metaphor in vocabulary learning in middle school is less discussed.This study intends to broaden the scope of application of Conceptual Metaphor Theory(CMT)in teaching practice.Three research questions in this study are:1.To what extent can CMT help students in vocabulary learning in terms ofbreadth and depth?2.How does CMT influence students' vocabulary retention and vocabularylearning strategy?3.What's the students' perception of CMT?A three-month research experiment was conducted in two parallel classes from a middle school in Dan Yang.The experiment class adopted the application of CMT into vocabulary teaching,including the vocabulary teaching method combining structural metaphor and context;vocabulary teaching method combining orientation metaphor with graphics and vocabulary teaching method using divergent thinking of ontological metaphor while the control class used the traditional vocabulary teaching.After three-month of the experiment,the research findings are: 1)Conceptual metaphor teaching has a positive impact on students' vocabulary learning,especially in promoting the depth of vocabulary.2)Conceptual metaphor teaching has obvious effect on vocabulary retention and is helpful to long-term memory of vocabulary.3)Conceptual metaphor teaching helps students form guessing and coding strategies in vocabulary learning.4)Students hold a positive attitude towards the teaching of conceptual metaphor,which improves their initiative and enthusiasm in vocabulary learning.Some teaching implications are put forward at the end of the thesis.