Research On Synonym Learning And The Learning Strategies Of English Majors

This is an empirical study on the mastery of English Synonyms and learning strategies used by the students to learn synonyms. Synonym, as one of the six semantic lexical relationships (including homonymy, polysemy, synonym, antonym, hyponymy and meronymy), has always been one of the difficult aspects of English vocabulary learning, which would influence the learners'language proficiency. It has been known by everybody that vocabulary learning strategies play a positive role in vocabulary learning. Numerous researches have proved that different learning strategies would have different effects. This study attempts to evaluate the English synonym study of Chinese English majors, including synonymic competence and attitudes towards synonym learning and so on. Besides, by comparing and analyzing the learning strategies used by students with higher scores and students with lower scores, this study tries to find out the suitable learning strategies for the learners to acquire synonyms. In the mean while, we also hope this study could shed some light on synonym teaching for the English teachers.In this survey,60 junior English majors from the Foreign Language College of Southwest Jiaotong University attended the investigation. According to John Lyons (1995)' classification of word-meaning, we choose three aspects of synonymic meaning as our test subjects:the emphatic aspect of conceptual meaning, the affective meaning and the stylistic meaning. We employed Yue Ying's (2002) synonym test paper. Based on Han Li's (2007) research, the author made some modifications with the help and guidance of the supervisor and the author's classmates to make the questionnaire more suitable for the current study. There are three parts in synonym test which contains totally 30 items. These three parts are designed to examine students'mastery of the emphatic aspect of conceptual meaning, the affective meaning and the stylistic meaning of synonyms respectively. The questionnaire contains 10 questions focusing on the aspects of learning attitudes, learning strategies and so on.The synonym test result shows that the average score of 60 participants is 34 which is lower than the passing score 36 (the full score is 60). And the average scores in the emphatic aspect of conceptual meaning, the affective meaning and the stylistic meaning are respectively 12,9 and 13 (the full score of each part is 20). Using the test results and TEM-4 scores of the participants as the original data, we use SPSS 12.0 to calculate the Pearson correlation coefficient and we also analyze the results of the questionnaire. Based on the results and analysis, we get the following conclusions:1. There is a strong positive correlation between synonymic competence and language proficiency. Generally speaking, the more capable one is of using synonyms, the higher his language proficiency. This also shows that improving synonymic competence is a must for the learners to improve their language proficiency.2. We found that the students mastered the stylistic meaning best, the emphatic aspect of conceptual meaning worse and the affective meaning worst.3. Over 60% of the participants found that it was difficult to master synonyms and they spent at least half of their vocabulary learning time in studying synonyms. However, the effects are not good enough. Among the problems or aspects causing the difficulties, the influence of Chinese is the major one which has been mentioned by around one third of the participants. Thus, the negative transfer of the mother tongue has influenced the synonym learning to a great extent.4. By comparing the synonym learning of students with higher scores and students with lower scores, we found that the students with higher scores have a wider range of learning strategies and use the strategies more frequently than the students with lower scores do. There is a big difference in the aspect of motivation between the students with higher scores and the students with lower scores:the students with higher scores have shown stronger motivation in learning synonyms. Concerning learning strategies, guessing from the context and consulting dictionaries are the most widely used ones to learn synonyms. Compared with direct learning strategies, the indirect learning strategies could better promote the learning of English synonyms.According to the findings of this study, synonyms is an inevitable difficult aspect of English learning, it is hard to make good results without correct learning methods. Anyone, either the student or teacher, should pay attention to synonym learning, trying to avoid negative transfer of mother tongue. Adopting appropriate learning strategies would help promote the efficiency of learning synonyms.