In the Proceedings of the Thirteenth International Symposium and Book Fair on English Teaching. Volume 2, Web version. Taipei: ROC English Teachers' Association-Republic of China. Teaching Economy Metaphors : A Psycholinguistic Perspective through the CMM Siaw Fong Chung Kathleen Ahrens National Taiwan University National Taiwan University claricefong6376@hotmail.com kathleenahrens@yahoo.com Abstract This study examines the teaching of economy metaphors in Taiwanese EFL classroom through psycholinguistic experiments. Two tasks are carried out towards 24 undergraduate students of National Taiwan University. One half of the students are provided input of vocabulary items based on the Lexical Approach (Lewis, 1993, 1997); the other half are given additional input based on the Conceptual Mapping Model (Ahrens, 2001). The CMM is itself a bottom-up, linguistic-based model which contributes to the variation of pedagogy as well as the systematic way of comparing metaphors cross linguistically. In Task 1, which is a vocabulary test on 10 economic metaphors, subjects with the CMM input score higher in items of lower frequency. Task 2 tests the similarities and differences of Mapping Principles cross-linguistically by analyzing the source domains selected by subjects in English-to-Chinese translation of metaphors. This research provides an alternative pedagogy for teaching metaphors in the EFL classroom – a method that underlines the Mapping Principle for target-source pairings in metaphor teaching. Key Words: economy, Conceptual Mapping Model, Mapping Principle, Lexical Approach INTRODUCTION Metaphors are present in every day’s language use. Charteris-Black (2000), for instance, carried out a comparative language analysis of the Economist magazine and the economist section of the Bank of English corpus. The results suggested that the metaphoric lexis in the Economist were higher in frequency than in the general magazines. This suggested that the ESP learners are dealing with more metaphors as part of their ‘technical’ register. Incorporating this idea in teaching, Boers (2000) carried out an experiment comparing the teaching of economy metaphors to two groups of learners – one with special attention to the metaphoric meanings and the other with dictionary definitions of the metaphors. The subjects were the French-speaking university students of business and economics at the Universite Libre de Bruxelles. The targeted items for his experiment were overcoming a hurdle, bailing out, weaning off, shifting tack and weeding out. The different inputs for both groups were claimed to have affected the understandings of the learners – with the groups shown the metaphoric meanings performing better than the other group. One possible difficulty with Boer’s (2000) analysis was that the theoretical criteria was unclear for the determination of the metaphors. For instance, the examples of Health and Fitness (Boers, 2000:139) range from sickly company to an acute shortage. The problems with these examples lie in (a) the target domain of ECONOMY was not constrained. For instance, it was uncertain whether company is an element of ECONOMY, BUSINESS or ORGANISATION; (b) the target domain was unstated: the term storage is ambiguous – i.e., it could have literally meant the shortage of medicine in some place or shortage of workforce. Without the appearing of the source domain, it was uncertain what this shortage was referring to. In what follows, this paper suggests the use of the Conceptual Mapping Model (CMM) (Ahrens 2002) which provides a clearer theoretical analysis of metaphors. In terms of the teaching of metaphors cross-linguistically, Deignan, Gabrys and Solska (1997) suggested that there are four types of variations between languages: (a) same conceptual metaphor and equivalent linguistic expression, (b) same conceptual metaphor but different linguistic expression, (c) different conceptual metaphors used, and (d) words and expressions with similar literal meanings but different metaphorical meanings. These authors suggested the use of translation to obtain examples of these four types. However, if the operational definition was not clearly laid out regarding ‘conceptual metaphors,’ the results of the translation could not reflect what the learners had in store for metaphors. This is reflected