A Study On The Metaphorical Competence And Use Of Pre-service English Teachers

As research on metaphor at the cognitive level has gradually increased in recent years,the study of metaphorical competence has also gradually received the attention of scholars.According to conceptual metaphor theory,metaphor is a process of mapping from a source domain to a target domain,where humans tend to map familiar semantic elements in the source domain to unfamiliar concepts in the target domain and construct cognition from them.Awareness of the importance of metaphor in foreign language teaching is growing,and more and more metaphor-related classroom designs and activities are being incorporated by scholars into foreign language teaching.In addition,ESP(English for Specific purposes)scholars have realized that metaphor has a great potential to introduce words outside into this profession,and this discipline-related potential has become a great challenge for ESP teaching.Enhancing metaphorical awareness and developing metaphorical competence will be one of the teaching objectives in the ESP classroom.As the backbone of Chines basic English education,and with the trend towards research-based teachers,the metaphorical competence of pre-service English teachers is crucial to the future development of English teachers and the quality of English teaching in China.In this study,39 seniors in English teaching major from a university in Jiangsu Province were selected to study their metaphorical competence from the perspective of metaphorical competence and metaphorical performance in English writing by means of a metaphorical competence test and a writing test.This study will explain the overall native and second language metaphorical competence of English pre-service English teachers,the metaphors produced in English writing,and the correlation between metaphorical competence and the number of metaphorical production in English writing.The corpus was collected from essays written by the participants in their final examinations.This paper uses the online corpus annotation tool Wmatrix for semantic domain identification,and the metaphor identification method refers to Pragglejaz’s Metaphor Identification Procedure(MIP).Several findings were obtained in this study.Firstly,the metaphorical competence of pre-service English teachers was generally at an intermediate level,and there exist individuals with strong and poor individual ability.Secondly,the number of metaphorical use in participants’ English writing on a particular topic was low and the metaphorical density was not high.There are cases of repeated use of the same conceptual mapping,and most of the metaphorical use are dormant and tired metaphorical expressions.Thirdly,the relationship between pre-service English teachers’ MC and the number of metaphorical use in their English writing is not clear,and the metaphorical production in their writing did not fully reflect the participants’real metaphorical performance.Future research should choose or design more targeted,or guided,corpus collection methods to explore their multifaceted metaphorical use in depth.Based on the above findings,this study recommends that teacher educators and pre-service English teachers increase their attention to the development of metaphorical competence in order to promote the high-quality development of English teachers in China.