THE EFFECT OF COGNITIVE FUNCTION OF METAPHORS ON TEACHING ECONOMIC TERMS TO IRANIAN ECONOMIC MAJORS IN ESP COURSES

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of two strategies of explicit teaching of economic terms on learners' vocabulary learning and retention. In the first explicit strategy, known as 'etymological elaboration', the focus was on presenting conceptual metaphors through 'identify-the-source' tasks, that is, providing the learners with the source domains underlying the metaphors, i.e., the literal meaning of the concepts. In the second explicit method, using 'identify-the-meaning' tasks, the metaphors were instructed by means of the context-based definitions. To be sure if there is any effect for the explicit teaching of metaphors or not, a third group was selected to function as the control group. In this group, the economic texts were taught in the traditional way, that is, by translating the texts into the learners' first language, i.e., Persian. The participants were three intact groups of university students majoring in Economics at Isfahan University, Isfahan, Iran. The results of the study demonstrated that the learners in Experimental Group 1 outperformed those in Experimental Group 2 and Control Group in vocabulary and retention tests. The study concluded that making students acquainted with the literal meaning of the conceptual metaphors, i.e., their underlying source domains will help them in learning and retention of technical economic terms.