A Corpus-based Research On Chinese EFL Learners' Synonyms Learning

This study examines the Chinese EFL (English as Foreign Language) learners'learning or acquisition of English synonyms (or near-synonyms). The study extracts from a native speaker corpus and a learner corpus some contrasting data, which indicate the semantic and associated syntactic behaviors of the chosen group of near-synonyms: wish, hope, want, and expect, as they are used by native English speakers and by Chinese EFL learners. The distributional differences of this group are hard to be recognized and analyzed solely by human intuition, even by authoritative dictionaries. The differences are so important to be made clear, in order to provide the Chinese EFL learners with enough evidence so that they can imitate the usage and make their learned language"native-like".Since human intuition is not enough to tell the differences between near-synonyms, this study adopts a new approach—the corpus-based approach, to demonstrate the semantic and syntactic behaviors of the chosen group of synonyms. The present paper is to show in what ways the Chinese EFL learners'use of the set of near-synonyms is similar to and/or different from that of the native speakers, using Contrastive Analysis and Error Analysis. That is to say, data from both the native speakers'corpus and the Chinese EFL learners'corpus will be extracted and then compared.From close contrastive observation of the concordance lines extracted from the two corpora, the differences are classified and the corresponding causes are inferred.The methods will focus on frequency, semantic collocation and syntactical structure, as indispensable dimensions of words treatment. The present study is carried out to answer the following questions:1) How do the Chinese EFL learners use the group of synonymous words wish, hope, want, and expect?2) What are the similarities and differences between Chinese EFL learners'use and the native speakers'use of this group of synonyms?3) What are the specific features of Chinese EFL learners'misuse of the group of synonyms, compared with the native speakers'use?4) What are the main causes of the misuse? 5) What are the pedagogic implications?By comparing the extracted data, we find that there exist great differences between the use of native speakers and the Chinese EFL learners. The five possible explanations for the overuse and inappropriate use are: 1) learners'unawareness of the stylistic impact in written English; 2) the limited exposure of learners to the English language; 3) their preference for the"primary counterpart"; 4) the influence of EFL teaching materials and teaching methods; and 5) negative influence from learners'mother tongue.This corpus-based exploration of English synonyms may shed a new light upon our teaching practice in the future, especially in the area of teaching English synonyms.