A Preliminary Study On The Synonym Learning Of English Majors

As a preliminary study on the synonym learning of English majors, this thesis will call into the attention of English teachers who are interested in the development of vocabulary teaching.Based on semantics and theories on learning strategies, we have a discussion on the research results. And we bring forward teaching suggestions in combination with the prevailing teaching theory: social constructivism.Semantics are one of the forms of storage in human brains. Then, synonymy can also be stored and emphasized from the perspective of semantics.Large amounts of researches and studies also show that learning strategies play a significant role in foreign language learning, especially in vocabulary learning."Learning strategy"is a learning element that has attracted the attention from all the teachers and students in the whole educational system. However, most people do not have a clear understanding as to how to make their choice from these strategies: misunderstanding and random exist in this respect. Thus we believe it necessary to enforce learning strategy training for synonym instruction in classroom settings, so as to enhance the students'ability to conduct learning by themselves.The research is conducted among the English majors in Shanghai International Studies University as the participants, in the form of a self-designed questionnaire. Our aim is to have a relatively comprehensive understanding of the students'opinion and status-quo on synonym learning, and to obtain a constructive summary and suggestions on synonym teaching.The results tell us that the students really have, to some extent, certain understandings of synonym learning. But they have limited systematic knowledge on learning strategies, and they pay little attention to the selection of different strategies in their learning process. Therefore, the author here suggests that English teachers should provide strategy training for their students, so as to make the best of classroom instructions. The reason why we have chosen"social-constructivism"to construct our conclusion of this research is out of its emphasis on"students as the center", which is in the very center of the education reform: because the ultimate goal of education is to teach the students how to learn.