Chapter One INTRODUCTION
1.1 Background of the Study
According to the author’s own teaching internship experiences, many students areupset about their listening ability when they talk about their problems in learningEnglish, and they never give up any chance to ask English teachers or English majorsabout the ways to enhance their listening ability. On the other side, the importance ofmetaphoric competence has also got increasing attention in foreign language teaching. Metaphor is treated as the instrument and result of human cognitive activities, anecessity for people to know new things, and an approach to organize and develophuman concept systems (Wang & Li, 2004). In recent years, there are a growingnumber of studies on the application of metaphor theory to English teaching, but mostof them put the emphasis on the relationship between metaphor and vocabulary,reading comprehension and culture. The relationship between metaphoric competenceand listening proficiency does not catch enough attention. Since we can not find anyrequirements on metaphoric competence in the Requirements (2007), it could beinferred that in college English teaching cognitive competence of metaphors is socritically insufficient that quite a few English enthusiasts do not know the first thingabout the concept of metaphor, let alone consciously apply it to polishing their verbalexpressions.Language is the product of human cognition, and it is metaphorical in nature.Therefore, metaphor might have the possibility to provide a brand new view for thestudy on second language teaching. This study intends to figure out whethermetaphoric competence could be developed in class settings or not, explore therelationship between metaphoric competence and listening proficiency, and figure outwhat benefit could MC bring to listening proficiency? People’s understanding ofmetaphor and metaphoric competence is hoped to be enriched after this study. Thisstudy also hopes to help people recognize the significance of improving metaphoriccompetence to English learning, and dig out a brand new way to improve Englishlearners’ listening ability. Also this study will, to some extent, inspire more researchersto do further study on metaphoric competence and listening.
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1.2 Layout of the Thesis
This dissertation is composed by five chapters.Chapter One is the introduction to the whole thesis including the background, thesignificance of the study, and a preview of the organization of the thesis.Chapter Two presents a detailed review of different theories on metaphor, metaphoric competence and the cognitive process of listening comprehension whichwork as the theoretical support to the study. The status quo of studies on metaphoriccompetence at home and abroad is also reviewed in details.Chapter Three documents the methodology of this research. The researchquestions, subjects, instruments, teaching experiment process, data collecting andanalyzing procedures compose this part.Chapter Four reports in great detail the results derived from the experiment. Withthe analysis of the results, students’ metaphoric competence, mastery of different typesof metaphors, and the correlation between metaphoric competence and listeningproficiency are discussed at length.Chapter Five summarizes the major findings of the research. Implications for thelearning and teaching of English listening are provided and the limitations of this studyare also presented in this chapter.
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Chapter Two LITERATURE REVIEW
2.1 Metaphor
The word “metaphor” itself is of Greek origin and descends from the word“metapherein”. The term “Metapherein” can be divided into two parts: “meta” whichmeans “beyond” and “pherein” which means “to bring”. It refers to a dynamic processtransporting something from one place to another. Richards claims in The Philosophy ofRhetoric, “As the omnipresent principle of language, metaphor probably exists in everythree sentences in daily conversation” (Richards, 1965, p. 98).More than two thousand years witnesses that the studies on metaphor in the Westhave undergone the status from superficial to deeper, from simple and crude to difficultand complicated. According to the research scope and method, the history of metaphorstudies can be divided into three phases: The first phase can be traced back to ancientGreek period to the 1930s, in which period metaphor was discussed as a rhetorical device.The second phase is from the 1930s to 1970s, focusing on semantic studies on metaphorfrom the views of logic and philosophy and linguistics. The third phase is from 1970s upto now, multi-dimension and multi-disciplinary studies on metaphor being undergone,such as cognitive psychology, pragmatics and hermeneutics (Shu, 2000b).
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2.2 Metaphoric Competence (MC)
With the development of metaphor theories, metaphor is studied from all aspects.People gradually accept the opinion that metaphor plays a vital role in daily life andlearning. In order to communicate with others appropriately, people realize metaphorsshould be learned. The ability of using and creating them is attracting scholars’ attention.Then metaphoric competence receives more and more attention.In regard to metaphoric competence, to a large extent it should be sorted into thecognitive category rather than what traditional linguists categorize it. The past thirtyyears witnesses the studies on MC. In defining metaphoric competence linguists holddifferent opinions (Flahive & Carrell, 1977; Gardner & Winner, 1978; Pollio & Smith,1980). But none of the definitions could work full-scale and perfectly. For this reason ithas a false impression that theoretically it is out of the question to draw an agreedconclusion on the definition of MC. Despite this embarrassing situation, here somedefinitions on MC are present. It is anticipated to find a short working one which will atleast coincide with the guiding ideology this study follows.In the view of Gardner & Winner, MC is “the capacity to paraphrase a metaphor, toexplain the rationale for the metaphor’s effectiveness, to produce a metaphor appropriateto a given context, to evaluate the appropriateness of several competing metaphoricexpressions (1979, p. 58)”.
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Chapter Three RESEARCH METHODOLOGY...... 24
3.1 Research Questions ......... 24
3.2 Subjects.... 24
3.3 Instruments .... 25
3.4 Teaching Experiment Process...... 26
3.5 Data Collection .... 29
3.6 Data Analysis....... 30
Chapter Four RESULTS AND DISCUSSIONS ...... 32
4.1 The General Picture of MC ......... 32
4.2 The Influence of MC on Listening Proficiency......... 40
4.3 Mastery of Different Types of Metaphor....... 42
4.4 The Relationship between MC and Listening Proficiency.... 46
Chapter Five CONCLUSIONS........ 50
5.1 Major Findings .... 50
5.2 Pedagogical Implications....... 51
5.3 Suggestions for Future Research ....... 52
Chapter Four RESULTS AND DISCUSSIONS
4.1 The General Picture of MC
The full mark of MCT is 78 and, as 60% is taken as the cut-off score, 46.8 is thepassing mark. As demonstrated in Table 4.1, the scores of control group in the pre-testvary from 15.00 to 48.00, and the scores of experimental group vary from 15.00 to 52.00.The average score is 31.5667 and 31.4667 respectively, far below the passing mark of46.8. These statistics imply that neither group performs well enough in MCT pre-test.According to Table 4.2, sig. (2-tailed) is 0.963, greater than the significance level 0.05.This indicates there is no significant difference between the control group and theexperimental group. In other words, the general metaphoric competence of the subjects isquite low and there exists no difference in terms of metaphorical competence betweenthe two groups before the teaching experiment. This result corroborates the findings ofthe previous studies that in general second language learners’ metaphoric competence isat a low level (Daensi, 1992; Deignan et al. 1997; Zhao, 2003). It can be inferred thatsince MC is a sort of ability to innovate that develops along with human’s cognitivedevelopment, in spite of no specific metaphorical training learners’ MC could grow alongwith ages. But the progress is very slow.
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CONCLUSIONS
This paper reports on the general picture of metaphoric competence and listeningproficiency, mastery of different types of metaphor in listening comprehension and therelationship between metaphoric competence and English listening proficiency of collegenon-English majors. Results from the quantitative analysis of the MCT and listeningcomprehension test yield some findings as follows:
(1) On the whole, Chinese non-English majors’ English metaphoric competence isat a relatively low level and there is great room for improvement. MC can be developedthrough some training. After some metaphorical training, the learners’ improvement inMC is remarkable.
(2) After some metaphorical training, metaphoric competence could help enhancelistening proficiency. With the development of the ability to interpret and generatemetaphors, learners can employ this ability to better understand the utterances inlistening comprehension.
(3) The difficulties in mastering different types of metaphors are different.Prepositional metaphors are by far the easiest to process. As for adjectival and nominalmetaphors, learners could grasp them after some training. Verbal metaphors are the mostdifficult.
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