A Survey Study Of Lexical Stylistic Awareness In Writing Of English Majors

The quantitative and qualitative methods are used in this study to investigate thepresent situations of English major students’ lexical stylistic awareness in writingthrough questionnaire and interview on the freshmen and junior students, as well asthe teachers in Guangxi Teachers Education University. This study aims to find outthe present situation of English major students’ lexical stylistic awareness in writing,providing suggestions for stylistic teaching. The research questions are as follow:(1)What is the current situation of English major students’ lexical stylistic knowledgelearning?(2) What are the factors influencing cultivation of the stylistic awareness inlexical level?(3) Whether the junior students will perform better than the freshmen instylistic knowledge learning or not?(4) What are the strategies for cultivation of thestudents’ lexical stylistic awareness in writing?The results are as follows:(1) The English major students have a vague idea oflexical stylistic awareness in writing. They fail to tell the slight differences ofsynonyms such as style color and degree of formality. They fail to distinguishcolloquial style and literary style, formal style and informal style. Therefore, muchattentions should be attached to cultivation of the students’ communicativecompetence and stylistic awareness.(2) The teachers’ inadequate attention to stylistictheories and insufficient studies on stylistics lead to lack of style teaching. Theteachers fail to introduce stylistic knowledge to writing teaching in terms of thetextbooks. In addition, too heavy teaching tasks for the teachers make them allocateless time in style teaching.(3) Through comparison, the result shows that the juniorstudents perform better than the freshmen in stylistic knowledge learning.Based on the results of the survey, the researcher proposed some strategies tocultivate English major students lexical stylistic awareness in writing from the anglesof the learners and teachers:(1) For the learners, they should make the best use oflinguistic corpora, accumulating stylistic knowledge such as synonyms usages andlexical usage. The learners should pay much attention to the appropriate use of language in writing, to discriminate the differences of lexical style in terms ofpragmatic and stylistic angles. Meanwhile, the students should cultivate stylisticawareness through enriching their reading, consulting the dictionary and learninglinguistic theories.(2) For the teachers, they should introduce stylistic knowledge inclass teaching, helping the students to cultivate lexical stylistic awareness. Theteachers should help the students to distinguish the difference between spoken styleand literary style, formal style and informal style. Furthermore, the teachers shouldprovide the students with stylistic practices, to solid and use the stylistic knowledge,cultivating their stylistic competence.