A Preliminary Study On The Synonym Learning Of Advanced EFL Learners

This paper reports on a preliminary study on advanced EFL learners' synonym learning. It might be of special interest to teachers concerned with lexical semantics, and those who wish their students to gain lexical force.An approach combining lexical semantics and EFL learning strategy is used for the rationale of this study, and the latter is used for the discussion of its findings as well. Research of L2 vocabulary acquisition suggests that words can be stored and organized semantically in learners' mental lexicon. So synonymy should be one of the manners employed by learners to store words in their minds.There is a large amount of L2 research examining how learners approach the task of learning a second language. Learning strategies are believed to play an important role in L2 vocabulary learning. Selective attention is the strategy that learners decide in advance to attend to specific aspects of language input or situational details that cue the retention of language input. Inferencing is the strategy employed by learners to use available information to guess meanings of new items, predict outcomes, or fill in missing information. The author wants to test out the role of these two strategies in synonym learning.Three meaning aspects are selected as targets of the test of synonyms梩he emphatic aspect of conceptual meaning, the affective meaning and the stylistic meaning. And a questionnaire of small scale will serve to provide the test results with explanatory evidence. The test was conducted among 85 juniors of English major of Tianjin Normal University. Three hypotheses were intended:1) Learners' language proficiency positively correlates with their ability to select proper synonyms in given contexts. The correlation results mainly from the different use of learning strategies.2) Selective attention promotes synonym learning.3) Consulting dictionaries is a helpful way in synonym learning, but the overuse of dictionaries may impede the learning. With statistical significance, all the hypotheses were confirmed.2The results of the test show that many advanced EFL learners are not clear about the concept of word-meaning and they are not fully aware of the strategies they could adopt in synonym learning either. The author suggests that EFL teachers should play active roles in training students on strategies that have been evidenced as effective ones, especially in training less competent learners.