英语论文网

Chapter 1 Introduction引言
　　
　　College students learning English today do not only set goals to https://www.51lunwen.org/dxyylw/ pass Englishexaminations; they are also in the hope of achieving a high standard of English proficiencyto meet the needs of China’s economic development and international exchanges. Therecent National College English Curriculum Requirements (2004) also required teachers ofEnglish “to develop students’ ability to use English in a well-rounded way”, so students“will be able to communicate effectively”. Teachers and students do more practice inlistening, speaking, cultural awareness and even communication strategies than they didbefore. New problems, however, appeared: students who can pronounce a native likeEnglish cannot be understood by native speakers properly.Among various possible influencing factors, ignorance of Conceptual Fluency andabsence of Metaphorical Competence in language teaching and learning are probably themain causes. CF refers to “the ability to interrelate the underlying structure of concepts tothe surface grammar and vocabulary that reflects them” and “MC includes the capacity tofigure out conceptual metaphors and mental imageries in the target language and thecapacity to use conceptual schema in communication” (Danesi, 2000). Language learners“have had little or no opportunity to access the metaphorically structured conceptualdomains inherent in second language” (Danesi, 1992). For Chinese students, they typicallyuse English words and structures as carriers of Chinese concepts. Lakoff and Johnson (1980)indicated that the ordinary conceptual system, in terms of which human beings think and act,is fundamentally metaphorical in nature. Kecskes (2000) showed that MC is the mainfeature of native speakers’ output. Therefore, learning a language is a process of acquiringits conceptual system, and MC is the most important element of CF (Danesi, 2000;K vecses, 1996). In other word, Chinese EFL learners have to acquire not only thelinguistic system of English, but also the metaphorical conceptual imagery.In fact, scholars in China and abroad have carried out extensive researches on issues ofmetaphor (Cameron, 2003; Lan, 2005; Ortony, 1993; Shu, 2000a) after Lakoff and Johnsonredefined the notion “metaphor”; only recently some attention, however, has drawn to thedomain of pedagogy with the research into “MC”; and in China, empirical studies on thesubject were mostly carried out in English majors, meanwhile, most researchers focus onthe relation between MC and language proficiency (Denesi, 1992; Jiang, 2006), studies onmotivating factors of MC were rarely found.Since some research showed the relation between MC and language proficiency, thethesis will look into Chinese students’ MC of English and its motivating factors, andanalyze their interrelations from a cognitive perspective through a case study.The thesis consists of 6 chapters. Chapter one serves as introduction, showing thebackground and significance of the research, and introducing the framework of the thesis.Chapter two makes a literature review on metaphor, MC and their relations with secondlanguage acquisition, serves as a theoretical foundation for the current study.Chapter three is the research design, three research questions are raised, and a casestudy was carried out. The chapter also repre本论文由英语论文网提供整理，提供论文代写，英语论文代写，代写论文，代写英语论文，代写留学生论文，代写英文论文，留学生论文代写相关核心关键词搜索。