Study of conceptual metaphor in high school English Textbooks: A Case Study of People’s Education Edition

Abstract

Since Lakoff and Johnson proposed the Conceptual Metaphor Theory, metaphor has gradually been studied as a way of thinking and acting rather than just a rhetorical device. In the past few decades, Conceptual Metaphor Theory has been applied to many fields, especially the field of Foreign Language Teaching. For second language learners, understanding metaphors in a different culture is one of the barriers in the process of second language learning. This paper makes a quantitative and qualitative analysis of the metaphors in the high school English textbooks. By enumerating three different metaphors in the textbook, it is not difficult to see that metaphor has caused obstacles to students' foreign language learning. At the same time, statistics on the frequency of metaphors in books can help us intuitively realize the universality of metaphor in language. Therefore, teachers should adjust their teaching strategies in time and have special teaching methods for learning material that contains metaphors.