An empirical study on acquisition of near-synonyms in Mandarin Chinese as L2

Résumé En

This study discusses L2 acquisition of near-synonyms. Intermediate to advanced level learners, as their vocabulary increases, often misuse near-synonyms in production, due to semantic subtleties (such as shame vs. regret in English). Besides, in Chinese, many words belong to two or more lexical categories (similar to love in English, both a verb and a noun), which also triggers syntactic errors in production for learners whose L1 is French.The current pandemic situation provided us the opportunity to implement a “flipping class” setting with regular exercises performed on the Moodle platform in a grammar and vocabulary course. With regard to near-synonyms, forced-choice questions were used to examine learners’ acquisition strategy. In addition, different types of instruction were provided to guide learners, including explicit rules or implicit guidance relying on illustrations. Data collected from exercises produced by around 120 learners reveal a general tendency for learners to rely on syntactic distribution and argument structure as a tool of problem solving when available. Explicit instructions proved more beneficial than implicit input to grasp the syntactic constraints and semantic differences of near-synonyms. These findings contribute to the debate on pedagogical tips in teaching and learning the lexicon of a distant L2.