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