Synonym Information In English-Chinese Bilingualized Dictionaries For Advanced Learners

Synonymy,as one of the important lexical relations,has a great influence on language phenomena.And therefore English learner's dictionaries are indispensible means in English teaching,should make endeavors to provide learner with the useful information which could contribute to the discrimination of the subtle differences among English synonyms thereby improve learner's language proficiency.This thesis attempts to provide tentative treatments of synonyms information in ECBDs,which is conductive to advanced Chinese EFL learners' acquisition of synonymous words.By analyzing the treatments of synonym information in four well-known ECBDs targeting for advanced learners,it appears that there are four general ways to deal with the synonym information,that is,cross-reference,pictorial illustration,diagram,and lexical set for synonym discrimination.It is found that some treatments of synonym information in ECBDs are not conductive to help learners to acquire the synonymous words.Therefore,this thesis investigates some problems and difficulties in the process of advanced Chinese EFL learners' synonym acquisition on the basis of the comparative study of the behaviors of certain synonyms in both CLEC and BNC under the guidance of relevant theories of semantics and second language acquisition.It seems that learners are prone to overuse or underuse synonyms and their acquisition of synonymous words are still incomplete.Our study reveals that negative transfer of mother tongue,learners' tendency to use early-learned word,the inaccurate understanding of synonyms and primary counterparts are the major causes.In view of this,four learning strategies are proposed,i.e.increase language input of synonym, provide a proper context,adopt synonym discrimination,and give respective treatments for partial synonyms and near synonyms.In light of the mentioned above,several key points are stressed in compiling dictionaries for Chinese advanced EFL learners with respect of their properties of the synonym acquisition,and the corresponding models of the treatments of synonym information are also provided so as to satisfy learners' needs in encoding.