A Study Of Chinese EFL Learners’ Use Of Synonyms

Research on synonyms in L1and L2learning has attracted considerable attentionin recent years. However, synonyms and synonymy have not yet been systematicallystudied, especially in the field of second language acquisition. To be specific, fewconsensuses have been reached on how synonyms are acquired and applied by L2learners. The present study attempts to explore such problems by investigating therelationship between or among synonyms as well as the cognitive factors responsiblefor the features of English synonyms specific to Chinese EFL writing and speaking.The present study first redefines synonyms and their features from anoperationalizable perspective. On the basis of an overall review of the theoreticalcontribution from structuralism, semantic category, psycholinguistics, secondlanguage acquisition and cognitive classification, a cognitive model (hypothesis) ofsynonymous relationship is established. The research questions are as follows:1)What are the cognitive trends of Chinese EFL learners in their use of Englishamplifier synonyms?2) How do the factors of cognitive classification of Englishsynonyms affect the engineering students who are highly proficient in English?3)What are the cognitive characteristics of Chinese EFL learners in their Englishsynonym learning?This study consists of two relatively independent but complementary parts. PartOne, a corpus-based investigation, mainly explores the characteristics of Chineselearners’ use of English synonymous amplifiers, i.e. absolutely, completely, entirely,fully, totally and utterly. Part Two is an experiment, which is conducted on the basisof the findings of Part One. The subjects were129Chinese university students and53native English speakers. Three tasks were employed respectively, a proficiency test, aconnotation ranking task, and a synonym rating task.With both quantitative and qualitative methods, the present study adopts amultidimensional fine-grained approach. We have the following findings that i) theengineering majors who are highly proficient in English performed distinctively in synonym judgment; ii) The affecting factors can be concluded as follows (fromdifficult to easy): false synonyms, high-degree synonyms, stylistic application,grammar behavior, low-degree synonyms, and semantic collocation. The abovefindings suggest that there are both advantages and disadvantages in traditionalforeign language teaching method (grammar, vocabulary and differentiation), and theresults also reveal the necessity of developing a new learning method (stylistics,contrast between Chinese and English and granularity). Other findings include a newclassification of semantic prosody, a statistical approach to analyzing synonyms, theconstruction of semantic network and the value of core words. Finally, a briefimplication is discussed on re-examining the cognitive functions of synonyms,verifying the relevant research results in applied linguistics and improving EFLteaching.