A Research Of High School Students' Semantic Competence

In recent years, greater attention has been attached to the research of semantic theories, which, together with the term of competence, underlie the development of semantic competence. As phonological competence, morphological competence, grammatical competence, pragmatic competence and discourse competence, semantic competence is an important part of linguistic competence. Semantic competence can be divided into such two major modules as lexical semantic competence module and sentence semantic competence module. Lexical semantic competence module is further divided into six sub-modules of lexical meaning and grammatical meaning, sense relation, sense and reference, semantic features, kinds of meanings, and collocation of meanings, and sentence semantic competence module is further divided into five sub-modules of determine the number of sentence meaning, determine the content of each sentence meaning, determine indeterminancy of sentence meaning, sentence meaning relation, and paraphrase. Each sub-module can be further divided into sub-sub-modules.This is an experimental study of fostering high students' semantic competence. The survey involving students from two grades adopts the questionnaires based on some relevant theories and research findings as well as the author's teaching experience. The author categorized and quantified semantic competence by investigating the students' semantic competence with the combination of questionnaires, discussed the relation between semantic competence and linguistic competence, discovered the deficiencies of the students' semantic competence and took corresponding measures to develop and raise their semantic competence.Detailed analysis of data has yielded findings as follows:1 The semantic competence of high school students is low on the whole.2 Semantic competence is proportional to linguistic competence. There is an obvious difference between students in different grades. That is to say, the semantic competence of the students in Grade12 is higher than that of the students in Grade10. 3 No significant differences are identified between male and female students.4 Significant differences are identified between students who major in Art and students who major in Science.5 There exists a low correlation between their marks in the semantic competence tests and the English tests.In the light of the above findings, this thesis proves the necessity and feasibility ofsemantic competence training for Grade 10 and Grade 12 students in FLT classroom in the Chinese context . It suggests that semantic competence training be integrated into the teaching and the in-service training of English teachers on semantic competence should be carried out .The results also indicate that English teachers should help students to develop their correct beliefs and improve their semantic competence by creating situations in and out of class .At the end of this thesis, the author gives a brief discussion to the limitation and defect of the current study in the hope of throwing some insights for possible further studies.