CHAPTER 5 DISCUSSION
5.2 Teaching Suggestions
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suitable adjective to describe the beauty of ‘nature’. However, the participants in Group B held a contrasting opinion—they thought that charming was the most appropriate word for describing ‘nature’. The findings may show that the participants had different tendencies of using the two adjectives in terms of depicting the beauty of ‘nature’. From these findings, some implications for pedagogical practices could be generated. In the next section, we will present one of possible ways of designing language learning task to provide learners with opportunities to notice the gap between their own language use and the target language.
5.2 Teaching Suggestions
Based on the results in the present study, we found that the language learners seem to be more unfamiliar with the collocational use of pretty and the different uses of pretty and charming in terms of describing the attractiveness of an object. One of possible ways to help the language learners to make a better lexical choice from this set of near-synonyms is to teach them to identify the main difference between the two adjectives—
pretty tended to describe the outer beauty of a person or an object. The attractiveness of outer beauty was like a visual stimulus which makes you feel instantly pleased. While, charming was apt to describe the inner beauty which needs the language user to think and to experience the attractiveness. It may take more time to find out the attractiveness of inner beauty.
The following language learning task was adapted from one of tasks mentioned in the Keck and Kim’s (2014, p. 114) Pedagogical Grammar. It is expected that the learning task can be used to raise the learners’ awareness of subtle differences between pretty and charming. The aim of the task is to help them notice the differences between the pair of near-synonyms from identifying the sources of beauty of noun collocates.
To begin with the language task, each student will receive one worksheet. In the task, eight noun collocates of the two adjectives were selected from the top 20 R1 noun
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collocates from the COCA (see Chapter 3, Table 3-12).
Table 5- 1 The Design of the Language Learning Task
Types of Stimuli Sources of beauty Patterns Modified Nouns Items Person-stimuli Outer beauty pretty-only dresses (1)
face (2)
Person-stimuli Inner beauty charming-only accent (3) personality (4) Object-stimuli Outer beauty pretty-only flowers (5) pictures (6) Object-stimuli Inner beauty charming-only story (7)
book (8)
As demonstrated in Table 5-1, the eight noun collocates indicate the differences between pretty and charming in terms of their preferences of describing different sources of beauty. For pretty-only pattern, four noun collocates (i.e., dresses, face, flowers, and pictures) were selected as stimuli to indicate its preference of describing outer beauty. On the other hand, since the inner beauty was more likely to be described by charming, accent, personality, story, and book were chosen as the stimuli in the task.
Illustrations of the stimuli were provided to assist the learners in making judgements.
We searched the images of all the eight noun collocates describing by either pretty or charming on Google Images and all the illustrations can be ‘free to use, share, or modify’
as labelled on the search engine. In order to enhance the engagement of the learning task, the students are allowed to discuss with their group members to find out the inner beauty and outer beauty being described in the sentences. In addition, all the sentences are adapted from the COCA. The task is demonstrated as below.
Instructions:
Read each sentence below and discuss with your group members. Focus on the nouns described by either pretty or charming, whether it is an outer beauty (someone’s
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or something’s attractiveness can be immediately seen) or an inner beauty (someone’s or something’s attractiveness needs to take more time to experience or think.). Then, write down your answers, ‘O’ for outer beauty; ‘I’ for inner beauty, in the bracket.
(1) ( )
She thought that queens were beautiful and wore pretty dresses in all the fairy tales.
(2) ( ) He had muscles, flawless skin, and a pretty face too, with his perfect teeth.
(3) ( ) He is a friendly, 62-year-old man with a charming accent.
(4) ( ) He really has this charming personality bringing happiness to everyone.
(5) ( )
Every day I'd pick pretty flowers and put them in her room for her.
(6) ( ) You both had fun making pretty pictures with all the colors.
(7) ( )
This is a very charming story, and you're just going to love the adorable hero.
(8) ( ) This charming book that helps children see why manners are useful in our society.
However, there were some exceptions if we only differentiate pretty and charming by identifying the source of beauty of the modified noun. For examples, the nouns which can be collocated with the two adjectives (i.e., in the common pattern), traits and
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voice, may be hard to make the lexical choice only based this rule. In addition, in terms of the instance of charming smile, smile seems to be a physical appearance which can catch someone’s eyes instantly. It should be a person’s outer beauty. In these circumstances, the rule of making the lexical choice of the two adjectives based on the modified noun’s source of beauty may be violated. What we want to emphasize here is that the rule is not definite but general. However, it could be used for language learning and teaching of the set of near-synonyms—pretty and charming. To further solve the problems, teachers can help learners gain access to a number of data, which can be retrieved from the corpus based on the frequency of the words or collocational information. Providing learners with opportunities to observe and analyze the language data may allow them to notice the different language use between themselves and the native speakers. In turn, it can help learners to modify their output to be more close to the target language norms (Keck & Kim’s 2014, p. 106).
In Chapter 6, the main findings of the thesis will be summarized. Limitations of this study and suggestions for future study will also be addressed.
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CHAPTER 6 CONCLUSION
This chapter, we will firstly summarize the whole thesis in section 6.1. Section 6.2 will discuss the limitations found in the corpus analysis and psycholinguistic judgement task. Suggestions for future related study will also be addressed.
6.1 Overall Summary
Through the whole thesis, in Chapter One, the background and motivation of the study were addressed, including the difficulties of differentiating sets of near-synonyms.
Due to the subtle differences between them, the learning difficulty of making lexical choices was the focus of the thesis as well. In Chapter Two, some previous studies related to near-synonyms were reviewed. The prior studies investigated near-synonyms from corpus data, focusing on different linguistic aspects such as semantic, collocation, syntax, and register. Aside from investigating the differences from the linguistic aspect, some research also focus on the effect of aspects of society, suggesting that the language use can reflect one’s attitude. In order to know the language use of learners, some studies adopted psycholinguistic judgement tasks to attain the goal. Based on these studies, this thesis attempted to conduct an integrated approach, including both corpus analysis and a psycholinguistic experiment, to identify the difficulties of learning a set of near-synonyms.
For the choice of a set of near-synonyms, we focused on the adjective form of pretty and charming. Both the two adjectives can be used to describe an attractiveness of a person or an object. In Chapter Three of corpus analysis, we firstly introduced the methodology of analyzing pretty and charming through the corpus data (i.e., COCA).
In the semantic analysis, the data were identified based on the categories established by the word senses found in the dictionary and the results of most frequently appearing
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nouns modified by the two target words. From this analysis, we may observe that the semantic preferences of pretty and charming were more similar where the top one category of object-related modified nouns was ‘artifact’ (i.e., something created by people). Whereas, what makes them different was the gender of the person described in the sentences and the source of beauty of the modified noun. To be more specific, females’ attractiveness tended to be modified by pretty; whereas, males’ attractiveness was apt to be described by charming. Furthermore, pretty preferred to describe an attractiveness which can be seen instantly (i.e., outer beauty). While, charming tended to depict an inner beauty which takes times to experience or to think.
From the sub-classification of adjectives, pretty and charming had similar behaviors on the syntactic position and registers provided by the corpus. Both the two adjectives tended to show in informal registers and they were more commonly used in the attributive position. However, the corpus analysis may not directly explain language learner’s difficulties of using the two adjectives. In Chapter Four, a psycholinguistic judgment task was conducted to explore the effect of ‘source of beauty’, ‘patterns’ of collocates (i.e., pretty-only, charming-only, and common), as well as the combinations of ‘gender’. Based on the findings, one could know that the ‘patterns’ had a significant effect on the degree of acceptability of the participants. They were more unfamiliar with the collocational use of pretty-only pattern as well as the lexical choices between the two adjectives when describing the beauty of nature. Thus, in Chapter Five, we interpreted how pretty and charming were used by the native English speakers so as to distinguish the differences between the set of near-synonyms. The main difficulty of acquiring the two adjectives were identified from the psycholinguistic judgment task.
Based on these information, we provide one of possible ways to teach learners to differentiate pretty and charming through observing the source of beauty of modified nouns. In the following section, limitations and suggestions for future related studies
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will be discussed.
6.2 Limitations and Suggestions for Future Studies
In this thesis, an integrated approach including both corpus analysis and a psycholinguistic judgement task was adopted. However, some limitations exist in these two approaches and they will be discussed in this section for improving the designs of research methods in related studies in the future.
First, for the scope of corpus analysis, we only focused on the adjective form of pretty and charming. Within the set of near-synonyms, the adjectives can be used to describe an attractiveness of a person or a thing. However, we expect that future studies can broaden the research scope within other adjectives, such as lovely, beautiful, and nice. The comparison between these adjectives may provide a whole picture of this group of near-synonyms.
Second, as for the different behaviors of the two adjectives shown in the corpus data, we focused on several aspects to explore their differences, such as semantic, collocation, syntactic role, and register. In the thesis, we also found some instances showing that both adjectives had both positive and negative meanings. However, some aspects could be further investigated to demonstrate the discourse functions of the target words. For future studies, the researchers could investigate the adjectives from metaphors or meaning extensions.
Third, concerning the design of psycholinguistic judgment task, the collocates within three ‘patterns’ (i.e., pretty-only, charming-only, and common) were taken from the Sketch Engine. It provides the information about the grammatical behavior of the two lemmas and shows what patterns they share or are more typical of. However, the information provided by Sketch Engine was derived from the British National Corpus (BNC), which mainly represent British English. There may be some subtle different preferences in collocational use between British English and American English since
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the COCA was adopted as the source data in this thesis, which mainly focused on American English. In future studies, a further comparison of collocational use between British and American English could be undertaken before the design of the psycholinguistic judgement task.
Fourth, with respect to the psycholinguistic judgement task, the number of female and male participants in the study was unequal because of the difficulties of finding participants for the research. One of possible reasons of the imbalanced gender ratio in the study was related to the participant’s major subject. Most of the participants majoring in either Education or English and were females. In this circumstance, it may be hard to explore whether different genders would have different preferences in using pretty and charming. In future studies, online survey may serve as a tool to gather data automatically and reduce the difficulties of accessing individuals. The participants can complete the task at any time and place. Although online survey was convenient to conduct research, we should be aware of some disadvantages as well.
In sum, the thesis presented a corpus-based research method with quantitative approach to identify the differences between the two near-synonymous adjectives—
pretty and charming. This approach has proposed a clearer description of the two adjectives’ preferences for types of modified nouns, syntactic position along with registers. The language use of learners has also been discussed so as to find out their difficulties of acquisition and provide some pedagogical implications for learning near-synonymous adjectives. Based on the work of this thesis, the results could be utilized to further investigating other sets of near-synonymous adjectives. The limitations could provide some suggestions for the design of methods for future study. In addition, some insights into designs of language learning materials and the ways of teaching can be offered by the thesis.
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