A Study Of High-school EFL Learners’ Acquisition Of Semantic Preference Knowledge

Co-selection is the most important theory in Neo-Firthian corpus linguistics. There are three categories of co-selection arising out of the communication process, namely, the co-selection of lexis and lexis, the co-selection of lexis and grammar, and the co-selection of pattern and meaning. As most knowledge of co-selection is not easily noticed by L2 learners, it is largely learned implicitly. Implicit learning refers to an unconscious and natural way of learning the underlying structure knowledge of target words. By comparison, explicit learning is a conscious and deliberative process of searching for the linking between concept and its form. Both implicit and explicit learning play an important role in L2 acquisition. Based on these theories, this study is conducted to investigate effects of two different treatments (encounter frequency and single-or paired-word comparison) on high-school EFL learners" acquisition of semantic preference knowledge. The significance of this study is to uncover the feature of L2 semantic preference so as to give some practical suggestions on improving L2 accuracy and idiomaticity. The research questions to be addressed in this study are as follows:1. What effect does encounter frequency have on high-school EFL learners’acquisition of L2 semantic preference knowledge?2. What effect does single-or paired-word comparison have on high-school EFL learners’ acquisition of L2 semantic preference knowledge?3. What factors are responsible for effects of these two treatments on high-school EFL learners’ acquisition of L2 semantic preference knowledge?The present study primarily includes a teaching experiment, followed by a test to measure the effect of this experiment. The participants of the experiment were 70 senior students from two classes in D High School, Jiangsu province. All these students were required to finish four translation tasks containing two groups of target words. For the first group. Class A was named as High Frequency Group and Class B as Low Frequency Group. For the latter group. Class B was denoted as Paired-word Group and Class A as Single-word Group. The instruments of this study were mainly two tests and an interview. The pre-test was in the form of multiple choice and the post-test was a true or false judgment test. Following the post-test, an interview was carried out to find out more details about students’performance. The data were collected and analyzed both quantitatively and qualitatively. The major findings of the study are as follows:First of all, encounter frequency had a positive effect on high-school EFL learners’ semantic generalization. High Frequency Group outperformed Low Frequency Group. The difference between mean scores of two groups’mean scores is statistically significant.Secondly, paired-word comparison also had a positive effect on high-school EFL learners’ semantic generalization. Paired-word Group performed much better than Single-word Group. The difference between mean scores of two groups is statistically significant.Thirdly, three reasons for above effects are identified:(1) L1 influences high-school EFL learners’acquisition of semantic preference knowledge. When a target word and its Chinese equivalent tend to co-occur with similar words, L1 will facilitate learners’acquisition. If on the contrary, L1 will hinder the acquisition of L2 semantic preference knowledge. (2) Implicit learning affects high-school EFL learners’acquisition of semantic preference knowledge. Highly frequent encounter enables high-school EFL learners to unconsciously form the abstract meaning relation between target words and their own collocates. (3) Explicit learning influences high-school EFL learners" acquisition of semantic preference knowledge. The sentences of target words" synonyms provide a clue and make collocational behavior of target words more explicit for high-school EFL learners to summarize the semantic preference of target words.The above findings have some pedagogical implications:(1) It is advisable that L2 teachers create more opportunities for raising students" awareness of summarizing semantic preference:(2) In teaching synonyms, it is highly recommended that authentic sample sentences of the paired synonyms should be presented for students to compare the collocational behavior in a natural context; (3) It is more helpful to integrate implicit learning and explicit learning to facilitate L2 learners’ acquisition of semantic preference knowledge.