[ELTWeekly Volume 8, Issue 3 | January 18, 2016 | ISSN 0975-3036]
The word ‘thesaurus’ comes from the Greek meaning ‘treasure’ or ‘storehouse’ and the traditional thesaurus is a kind of storehouse of language. Roget’s Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases lists over 70 synonyms for fast, including zippy, fleet and nimble-footed. The editors have made no judgement about how useful each word is. The thesaurus marks words that are particularly formal or informal, but otherwise gives no information about how to use each word. The purpose of a thesaurus such as Roget is to remind native or expert speakers of the language of words they already know, but cannot quite bring to mind. It does not teach.
The needs of language learners are rather different. Even if they use a smaller thesaurus thanRoget, with fewer synonyms, they may still not know which word to choose, without information on the exact meaning and use of each word.
The result? According to teachers we interviewed, ‘Even high-level students use the same basic words again and again.’ ‘They need to be able to juggle synonyms.’ What information, precisely, do learners need to help them with this juggling act?
No two words are exactly the same
Consider the following pairs of sentences:
I used a very simple method to obtain the answer