I have a question about how to teach synonyms and their specific usage. For example, when do we use snake and when do we use serpent? When do we use habit, custom and tradition? How can we know which is the correct one to use?
This question is from C. M. V. Chandrakumar, India
Comments
joe
I would say that most people learn the meaning of the majority of words they use by the context in which they originally hear them. For example, I grew up going to church and heard the word 'serpent' used in prayers/The Bible and had to, subconciously, consider the difference between that word and 'snake' which was far more commonly used in everyday life. Without thinking about it, I learnt the difference because of the context in which the words are used.
That (learning the meaning of a word from experience) might be something you can consider doing for yourself, perhaps not subconsciously - analysing the context in which words are used in order to learn their specific usage. Explaining the value of this to your students might also help, of course this takes time and you could look the words up in a good dictionary, although that may/not have direct relation to the way the word is used in your (or the students') immediate English speaking environment.
Paul Kaye, Bolivia
Concordance programmes can help a lot by giving you contexts. Try this one: http://www.collins.co.uk/corpus/CorpusSearch.aspx
Lucinda Hazler, Austria
Some dictionaries give examples of the way a word is used in a sentence. I think it is easier to explain the word in context. Perhaps it would help to "google" the word or words.
Heidi Kincaid, Germany
Synonyms can be very challenging to teach. Some are very specific to the situation. If you look up the word annoy in the thesaurus you will find irritate. Either words will work when describing your feelings. But, when you look deeper at irritate it can also be used to describe our skin, but in this situation annoy will not work. I think as a trainer you have to be aware of the multiple usage of synonyms and let your clients know this. Otherwise, your clients may say in this case that they have annoyed skin, and this is embarssing.
Liliane Fonseca, Brazil
There are many books with common errors, grammar and dictionaries specifically to deal with English usage which show if a word is formal, informal, technical, etc. Nowadays we can also count on a corpus of English to check its usage. This issue is very important in ELT, since it is no use teaching technical words or 18th century vocabulary for daily communication.
Dr.Hoshang Farooq, Iraq-Kurdistan Region
I think one of the most effective ways to address the problem of teaching synonymy in English is to realize that mostly the individual members of a set of synonymous words do belong to different registers (degrees of formality). For example, the word SERPENT is more formal than SNAKE, or the word ENDEAVOUR is more formal than TRY; COLLAPSE is more formal than BREAK UP. Remember also that the more formal words are more restricted to the written language as well as scientific and academic registers while the less formal words (members in a synonymous set) are mainly used in the daily conversational contexts. Here you can resort to some dictionaries of synonymy which contain guidelines as to how they are used and in which contexts they can be employed.