Research on the Teaching Practice of English Poetry in Junior High School from the Perspective of Conceptual Metaphor Theory—Taking Emily Dickinson’s Hope Is the Thing with Feathers as an Example

Abstract

Against the backdrop of the Compulsory Education English Curriculum Standards emphasizing the cultivation of literary literacy, junior high school English poetry teaching still faces the contradiction between “understanding image connotations” and “overemphasizing language translation while neglecting metaphorical understanding”. So this study aims to explore the practical path of applying Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT) to junior high school English poetry teaching, taking Emily Dickinson's Hope Is the Thing with Feathers as a case. First, it analyzes the adaptability of CMT to junior high school students’ cognitive rules, confirming that CMT can help reduce the difficulty of understanding poetic images. Second, it dissects the core metaphor in the poem, and finds out the systematic mapping relationship between the “bird (source domain)” and “hope (target domain)”. Finally, it designs a three-stage teaching process based on CMT. And this research can show that CMT can provide a practical framework for junior high school English poetry teaching, and the designed teaching plan can improve students’ ability to interpret poetic metaphors. Furthermore, this study enriches the application research of cognitive linguistics in basic education and provides replicable teaching tools for English teachers.