The Application Of Spatial Metaphor Theory To English Phrasal Verbs Teaching In Senior High School

Lakoff and Johnson mentioned that metaphor not only exists in our language but also in our thinking and behavior.Metaphor thinking is a path to perceive our world and build up conceptual system.Metaphor has come into our world because a certain amount of vocabulary can not fully express our human being’s limitless thinking.Therefore,one single word or phrase needs to reflect from the original domain to the target domain.That is why every word or phrase has the prototype meaning and metaphor meaning.Lakeoff and Johnson insisted that human being’s cognition comes from our own life experience.Spatial metaphor is a common concept in our daily life.When people reflect the basic Spatial relationship onto the non-spatial or abstract concept,spatial metaphor comes into being.There is a practical meaning in using Spatial Metaphor Theory to guide the teaching of English phrasal verbs.Firstly,metaphor thinking plays an important role in the process of forming and developing English phrasal verbs.Therefore,it’s direct and effective in learning the English phrasal verbs by metaphor thinking;Secondly,it can help the students to learn other related phrasal verbs due to the effect of transfer;thirdly,spatial metaphor systematicness of phrasal verbs and their universality not only help to systematically learn vocabulary,but also help to understand the meaning of phrasal verbs in different contexts.Based on the Spatial Metaphor Theory,the paper focuses on the study of the application of the spatial metaphor concept to the teaching of English phrasal verbs in senior middle school,to help the second language learners to better learn English phrasal verbs.In this paper the particle "up" is chosen to discuss how to project from the concept of spatial domain to other domains.The particle "up" is chosen because there are so many English phrasal verbs collocated with "up",which causes a lot of difficulties for second language learners in learning English.Each particle has a variety of seemingly unrelated meanings,so it’s hard to analyze meaning;therefore,it is difficult for English learners to understand the meaning of a phrasal verbs when it is collocated with various particles.To solve this problem,the author has conducted some experiments,including two questionnaires and pre-test and post-test.The experiments are designed to test whether metaphor introduced in phrasal verbs teaching can effectively help learners to master phrasal verbs;whether spatial metaphor can help to keep long-term memory of phrasal verbs at the same time;whether the establishment of metaphor thinking helps to infer other new meaning of phrasal verbs;and whether the spatial metaphor can be widely used in other particles such as "down,in,out,on,over,away"or it is just confined to the particles "up"Through the experiments,the author finds that the introduction of spatial metaphor in English phrasal verbs teaching can effectively promote the learning of English phrasal verbs;that spatial metaphor helps to convert knowledge into long-term memory;that the establishment of metaphor thinking can help students to infer the new meaning of other related phrasal verbs,and the spatial metaphor is not limited to the phrasal verbs collocated with "up" but ubiquitous to such other particles as down,in,out,on,over,away.