摘要
作为对高程度英语学习者(advanced learners)同义词学习情况的初探，本文会引起那些关注词汇语义学发展的教师们的兴趣。
本文以词汇语义学和学习策略为理论基础对调查结果进行了探讨。第二外语词汇习得研究表明学习者可以以语义形式将词汇储存并组织在他们的心理词汇中，那么同义关系就应该是储存方式之一。
大量英语学习研究还表明，学习策略在词汇学习中发挥着很重要的作用。在选择性注意这个策略中，学习者在执行学习任务前就已决定要注意的语言输入的某些方面。在推断策略中，学习者通常会利用语境中的相关信息去推测生疏条目的意义，或者填充缺省的信息。本文作者试图通过测试探讨以上两种策略在同义词学习中发挥的作用。测试以三种词义为目标：概念意义的侧重点，情感意义与文体意义。
测试及调查选取了天津师范大学英语专业三年级三个班的85名同学为对象，旨在验证三个假设：
1．学习者的学能与他们的同义词运用能力正相关。这种正相关是由于学习者对学习策略采用了不同的使用方法。
2．选择性注意能够促进同义词的学习。
3．查阅字典是一种有助于同义词学习的方式，但过度依赖字典可能会阻碍学习。借助于统计软件和调查问卷的帮助，以上三个假设均被证实。
测试结果表明许多高程度的英语学习者对于意义这个概念和他们在同义词学习中应采用的学习策略认识不清。作者建议英语教师应该给学生，尤其是程度较差的学生提供策略培训，以期达到最佳的教学效果。
This paper reports on a preliminary study on advanced EFL learners' synonym learning. It might be of special interest to teachers concerned with lexical semantics, and those who wish their students to gain lexical force.
An approach combining lexical semantics and EFL learning strategy is used for the rationale of this study, and the latter is used for the discussion of its findings as well. Research of L2 vocabulary acquisition suggests that words can be stored and organized semantically in learners' mental lexicon. So synonymy should be one of the manners employed by learners to store words in their minds.
There is a large amount of L2 research examining how learners approach the task of learning a second language. Learning strategies are believed to play an important role in L2 vocabulary learning. Selective attention is the strategy that learners decide in advance to attend to specific aspects of language input or situational details that cue the retention of language input. Inferencing is the strategy employed by learners to use available information to guess meanings of new items, predict outcomes, or fill in missing information. The author wants to test out the role of these two strategies in synonym learning.
Three meaning aspects are selected as targets of the test of synonyms梩he emphatic aspect of conceptual meaning, the affective meaning and the stylistic meaning. And a questionnaire of small scale will serve to provide the test results with explanatory evidence. The test was conducted among 85 juniors of English major of Tianjin Normal University. Three hypotheses were intended:
1) Learners' language proficiency positively correlates with their ability to select proper synonyms in given contexts. The correlation results mainly from the different use of learning strategies.
2) Selective attention promotes synonym learning.
3) Consulting dictionaries is a helpful way in synonym learning, but the overuse of dictionaries may impede the learning. With statistical significance, all the hypotheses were confirmed.
2
The results of the test show that many advanced EFL learners are not clear about the concept of word-meaning and they are not fully aware of the strategies they could adopt in synonym learning either. The author suggests that EFL teachers should play active roles in training students on strategies that have been evidenced as effective ones, especially in training less competent learners.
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