An Empirical Study On The Application Of Conceptual Metaphor Theory To English Writing Teaching In Senior High Schools

Writing ability is reflective of comprehensive competency and cognitive way of thinking of a foreign language learner,which plays an important role in language learning.Writing process is a process of concept construction;that is,based on their physical and social experience,students establish a kind of conceptual thinking to pick up appropriate words and sentence patterns for expressing their thoughts and organizing discourse.However,in the current educational environment,students are trained to improve their writing ability by repeated and passive recitation of writing models,most of which only learn very little,giving rise to a series of sticky questions like inappropriate and repeated use of vocabularies,monotonous sentence patterns and incoherent discourse in their writing.Therefore,the author makes attempt to apply Conceptual Metaphor Theory(CMT)into English writing to explore the effects of its application on writing in senior high schools.To be specific,three detailed research questions are discussed in the study:(1)What effects does the application of Conceptual Metaphor Theory to English writing play on the lexical richness?(2)What effects does the application of Conceptual Metaphor Theory to English writing play on the syntactic diversity?(3)What effects does the application of Conceptual Metaphor Theory to English writing play on the textual coherence?A sum of 117 students from two parallel classes in a senior high school in N city being selected as research subjects,the research conducts a comparative teaching experiment lasting for totally 12 weeks.One of the two class,Control Class(CC),adopts a traditional teaching method while the other class,Experimental Class(EC)takes new teaching method under the instruction of CMT,and designs new-band practice activities.Before the implementation of experiment,the author tests students’ writing ability and metaphoric competence with results showing that there is no sign of dramatic difference between these two classes.In contrast to the period after experiment,test measuring students’ writing performance is carried out once again,with the purpose of comparing whether students in EC and CC achieve marked improvement in English writing ability with the guidance of two different methods.Finally,to gain a further insight of students’ attitudes towards writing method based on CMT,the author classifies EC students into three levels(advanced proficiency,intermediate proficiency,low proficiency)according to their scores and randomly picks up two students from each level to undertake interviews.The research combines quantitative and qualitative methodologies to ensure the objectiveness and accuracy of the research results.First,two experienced teachers are invited to score students’ compositions in terms of lexical richness,syntactic forms and textual coherence to observe students’ changes in these three aspects before and after the experiment.Apart from the above method,the author takes careful measurements in terms of each dimension.For lexical richness,lexical productivity and diversity in a unit are calculated on basis of the procedures of MIPVU(Metaphor Identification Procedure Vrije Universities).Syntactic diversity is measured by counting the amounts of metaphorical sentences derived from core metaphors,especially the numbers of conventional metaphors and novel metaphors respectively.In view of textual coherence,unrelated metaphors in the writing should be excluded from related ones.Then six writing samples are chosen in two class apiece to analyze the conceptual mappings between source domain and target domain.With writing samples collected and sorted,there are 5 samples that don’t satisfy writing requirements,remaining 112 students’ writing samples for further analysis.Through careful analysis of the writing samples,the key research findings are concluded as follows: firstly,in contrast to traditional teaching method,the new method holding the thoughts of CMT is effective to promote students’ lexical richness no matter how proficient students are.Secondly,such method is able to help students enhance the diversity of constructing sentence patterns,especially for those with high and intermediate levels of language competency.Thirdly,the teaching method built on CMT does contribute to students’ progress in textual coherence.