Lexical Meaning and Teaching College English Writing

Lexical Meaning and Teaching College English Writing After reading the paper Lexical Meaning and Teaching College English Writing by Xu subo,I realize that language competence plays a very important role when we doing English writing. As an English teacher, in addition to teach students the way or skill of writing, we should also focus on improving students’ language competence. For the improvement of the language competence, it is a basic guarantee and a necessity that we should have a detailed and comprehensive study of the meanings of lexical items, especially of those belonging to the common core of the English vocabulary. I would like to express my reaction to this point from following six aspects.

1、Grammatical meaning

In author’s opinion, the most basic guarantee of using words or producing sentence is grammatical meaning. It is an important link of writing teaching. Lexical grammatical meaning mainly shows that word class, the usage of words and inflectional changing form of lexemes. For grammatical meaning is the core of the ability of language and most dictionaries labeled them, when students study vocabulary, they should understand the lexical grammatical meaning firstly. It is the reason why that when we learning writing, teacher always emphasize it again and again. I began to understand that why teacher let us do so many exercises about grammar in senior school. Different lexemes or lexical items may have the same grammatical meaning.

2、Denotative meaning

Denotative meaning is meaning given in the dictionary. Being constant and relatively stable, denotative meaning forms the basis for communication as the same word generally has the same denotative meaning to all the speakers in the same speech community. However, when students remember words, they not only remember the Chinese meaning, but also understanding the English interpretation. In our writing, we can find out that we are used to writing Chinglish. It means that we do not understand some words denotative meaning, just remember the words by rote.

Therefore, during writing teaching, understanding the denotative meaning is very necessary.

3、Connotative meaning

Connotative meaning refers to the overtones or associations suggested by the denotative meaning. It is unstable, varying considerably according to culture, historical period, and experience of individual. From the paper’s example about different understanding on words—dragon and owl in different countries we can find out that connotative meaning is complicated. Intercultural communication may be influenced by that. In order to solve this problem, teacher should remind students to remember some culture words, especially focus on the extended sense of words in the dictionary. I believe that it good for students expressing their opinions clearly in writing and intercultural communication.

4、Stylistic meaning

Stylistic meaning also named social meaning, it related to the etymology, language history and social development. In some dictionaries, these stylistic features are clearly marked as ‘formal’, ‘informal’, ‘literary’, ‘archaic’, ‘slang’ and so on. The stylistic differentiation is especially true of synonyms. For example, mother is formal, mom is colloquial, and mama is child's language. Studying and remembering the lexical stylistic meaning consciously play a very important role in English learning. It told us that how to use words in different occasion. If we can use the words selectively by their stylistic meaning, we would get improvement in writing.

5、Affective meaning

Affective meaning expresses the speaker’s attitude towards the person or things in question. This meaning can be overtly and explicitly conveyed simply by the choice of the right words as many have emotive content in themselves. Words that have emotive values can be divided into three parts: appreciative, pejorative, and neutral. In many cases, the affective meaning is brought out only by the speakers in context. During the writing class, teacher should not ignore the lexical affective meaning because it can affect the communication directly. Sometimes, we are tend to use neutral word to express our point in order to make our writing convincing.

6、Collocational meaning

Collocational meaning is that part of the word meaning suggested by the words with which it co—occurs. Some words are established by usage, they have not the rules to follow. For example, ‘treble with fear’ and ‘quiver with excitement’. In my opinion, different words in different collocation have different meaning. When teaching students how to write, the teacher not only asks students to keep the constant collocation in our mind, but also avoid using literal translation from Chinese. Accumulating the typical phrases is a good way for me knowing more about the lexical collocational meaning.

Writing ability is a comprehensive ability comprised of cognitive ability, thinking ability and the language competence. In this paper, author mainly talks about the language competence. However, I agree with him that cognitive and thinking abilities are acquired simultaneously with the acquisition of the mother tongue. Therefore, in English writing teaching, language competence teaching was regarded as the top priority in foreign language teaching. Writing is one of the most important means in intercultural communication. If we understand the lexical meaning, such as the grammatical meaning, the denotative meaning, the connotative meaning, the stylistic meaning, the affective meaning and the collocational meaning, our language competence would be improved. I think it is very good for our writing. Therefore, it is very necessary for teacher to understand the relationship between lexical meaning and teaching college English writing.