A Study Of EFL Learners’ Awareness Of Semantic Prosody

With the rapid economic development of China in recent years and the more and more important role that China plays on the international stage, English as one of the major international languages has a higher degree of popularity and acceptance in China. The Chinese people living in different sectors flock to the craze to learn English which seems to have become the Chinese people "darling" in the present days. People are proud to be able to communicate with foreigners in English. English as a bridge opens the door of China to the foreign guests, showing the Chinese charm in another way, promoting exchanges between different countries, and enhancing the status and the image of China in the international community. In this exchanging process, however, there will often be a strange phenomenon called "Foreign Accent", which makes native English speakers feel uncomfortable. When Chinese English learners are in use of English, there are no mistakes in the aspect of grammar and syntax. But when they use some words, they will make some pragmatic errors. Therefore, educators should attach great importance to the subtle relationship between English vocabulary and grammar and semantic prosody is the bridge linking the seemingly unrelated vocabulary and grammar together.Semantic prosody is an important study issue in contemporary corpus linguistics and as a hot research topic, it is attracting more and more interest of the researchers. Semantic prosody is a special collocational phenomenon which shows the special behavior of word collocation. Generally it is divided into positive semantic prosody, negative semantic prosody and neutral semantic prosody. Collocational behavior in EFL learners’ language has always been the focus of the second language research. This thesis focuses on the study of EFL learners’ awareness of semantic prosody. This study makes a comparative analysis of the percentages which the English major students apply cause and lead to with their collocates and find the changes of the students’ awareness of semantic prosody. The corpus-based study and the test paper study are applied to the analyses of EFL learners’ awareness of semantic prosody so that the results can be obtained more objectively and accurately. In general, there are the differences of the awareness of EFL learners with different English levels. Although the awareness of semantic prosody is clearer with the increase of English levels, the deficiencies of collocations in the second language teaching and learning cannot be ignored. In addition, the author also gives out the possible solutions to the problems of semantic prosody for Chinese EFL teaching.