A Survey Of Central Asian Students’ Mastery Of Conceptual Metaphor ——Taking Chinese Proficiency Test (HSK) As An Example

Cognitive linguistics holds that metaphor is the mapping between two cognitive domains and the general law for people to understand the world and form concepts.In other words,people talk about or think about strange and abstract concepts with familiar and specific structures and relevant knowledge or experience,which is conceptual metaphor.As the link between cognition and language,it provides a new perspective for understanding human thinking process,behavioral experience and foreign language teaching.For second language learners with Chinese as the target language,it is of great practical significance to understand and master the practical application of conceptual metaphor in Chinese.In teaching Chinese as a foreign language,Chinese Proficiency Test（HSK）is an important basis for investigating the mastery of Chinese by foreign students.It is the most recognized proficiency test in China,which is used to test students’ Chinese cognitive ability,understanding ability and application ability.It not only pays attention to the objectivity and accuracy of the evaluation,but also pays attention to the evaluation of the examinee’s current level,as well as the further improvement and development of the examinee’s Chinese ability.Therefore,Chinese Proficiency Test（HSK）is an effective tool to study the law of Chinese learning and teaching.At the same time,it also provides a lot of valuable materials for the research of teaching Chinese as a foreign language.Taking the conceptual metaphor theory in cognitive linguistics as the theoretical framework and the corpus collected and screened in the Chinese Proficiency Test（HSK）as the research object,this paper classifies the conceptual metaphors,and summarizes six types of conceptual metaphors: Travel metaphor,engineering metaphor,war metaphor,object metaphor,human body metaphor and natural metaphor.It also investigates the mastery of conceptual metaphors involved in the Chinese Proficiency Test（HSK）by middle and senior level Central Asian students.The survey results show that students have some obstacles in identifying and understanding conceptual metaphors in the Chinese Proficiency Test（HSK）,and the overall mastery is general.On this basis,this paper discusses the impact on the mastery of conceptual metaphor from five aspects: Learners’ gender,country,mother tongue,length of learning Chinese and HSK level.Combined with the interview to analyze the causes of errors of conceptual metaphor in the questionnaire,it is concluded that the longer learners learn Chinese,the higher their mastery of conceptual metaphor,and the mastery of Chinese conceptual metaphor can promote and deepen the improvement of learners’ learning ability.Finally,some suggestions are put forward from three aspects: teaching,learners themselves and teaching materials,hoping to provide help for the teaching of conceptual metaphor in teaching Chinese as a foreign language.