英语论文网

Chapter One INTRODUCTION

1.1 Introduction
This short chapter offers a general introduction to the whole research, sketching abrief outline of the thesis. It starts with a discussion suggesting that English idiomlearning is a big problem for Chinese EFL (English as a Foreign Language) learners.Next, it introduces the main purpose, the significance and the scope of the study. Finally,it outlines the organizational structure of the thesis.
……………

1.2 Background of the Study
English idioms，which are common in daily language，are an essential andinseparable part of English vocabulary. They are traditionally accepted as multiwordexpressions with fixed structures, and are considered as the essence of language due toits distinctive cultural connotations. Cooper (1999) demonstrates that about 3000metaphors and 7000 English idioms are used by the adult native speakers per week，which shows the frequent occurrence of English idioms both in written and spokendiscourse. However, learning English idioms has long been regarded as a thorny issueas they are figurative expressions that do not always mean what they literally state. Wuand Chen (2000) point out in their research that, compared with other kinds ofvocabulary acquisition, the acquisition of collocations, especially idioms, is the leasteffective.According to Kovecses and Szabo (1996), English idioms constitute one of themost difficult areas of language learning for both teachers and learners for bothpractical and theoretical reasons. Therefore, they have aroused great interests among theresearchers at home and abroad since 1970s. Despite the long history of researchcentered on idioms, two major views are worth mentioning, which are the traditionalviews on idioms proposed by Fraser (1970) and the cognitive views on idioms putforward by Lakoff and Johnson (1980). According to the former, an idiom is regarded“as a constituent or a series of constituent for which the semantic interpretation is not acompositional function of the formatives of which it is composed”，which means thatidioms are regarded as a multiword unit which can't be decomposed and therelationship between the meaning and its individual elements is arbitrary. Whereas thelatter proposes Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT) and claims that the meanings ofmost English idioms are motivated by their underlying conceptual metaphors ratherthan random and arbitrary. Therefore，most idioms are compositional and analyzable.The research on the application of CMT to second language (L2) and foreign language(FL) pedagogy in overseas has been carried out for more than 20 years. However, it isstill in the initial stage in our country, especially the empirical studies.
………………

Chapter Two THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK

2.1 Introduction
This chapter contains the theoretical foundations of the present study. Thedefinition and different views towards English idioms will be discussed first, thedevelopment of metaphor theories, including the characteristics and classifications ofCMT，will be described and explained afterwards. Traditionally，idioms are taken as simply a matter of language itself. Therefore,their syntactic and semantic properties are the primary focus for the researcher. Forsome scholars (Cooper，1998; Katz & Postal, 1963), the idiom is a quite inclusive term,which contains fixed phrases, formulaic sequences, prov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。