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Synonym discrimination competence, being the difficult and important part of depth vocabulary knowledge acquisition, is critical to the quality of learners’language output. However, it is hard to get clear explanation of synonymous words on the basis of intuition and introspection, or even from authoritative dictionaries, only to lead to semantic confusion and misuse. The best way of knowing the learners’competence of synonym discrimination is to focus on their actual output.This paper, based on the Contrastive Interlanguage Analysis, aims to study Chinese EFL learners’use of synonyms. Chinese Learners’English Corpus is employed to represent the Chinese learners’language competence, or the interlanguage competence. A detailed and systemic analysis of the differences in the use of big, large, great and quite, rather, is made between CLEC and BNC.The present research is composed of four procedures. Firstly, with the assistance of Wordlist function of WordSmith Tool 3.0, the frequencies of the node words are extracted from CLEC and BNC. The log-likelihood value is produced to test the statistical significance of the data obtained. A comparison, from the point of frequency, is made with the causes being analyzed. Secondly, in the Concord program of WordSmith Tool 3.0, the collocations and concordance lines of the node words are extracted with mutual-information score presented standing for the collocational strength. Thirdly, from the aspect of collocation precision, a comparison is made together with an analysis of the causes. Fourthly, a comparison is made from the aspect of semantic prosody and the causes of the differences are briefly illustrated.With abundant textual evidences and statistically significant data, the hypothesis that there exist differences in the use of synonyms between Chinese EFL learners and native speakers is proved, and the differences lie in three aspects, overuse of big, great and underuse of large, quite, semantic imprecision together with semantic inharmony. As to the causes of such deviances, there are mainly three: interlingual transfer, which can be traced back to the lack of target language knowledge; intralingual transfer, which can be attributed to the traditional grammar-translation teaching method; together with the communication strategies employed by the learners, such as substitution and avoidance. The two kinds of transfer maybe entangled with each other.Suggestions and implications, such as enhancing the collocation awareness of learners, and enhancing the quantity and quality of input, etc. are generated from the quantitative and qualitative analysis. It must be helpful, no matter theoretically or practically, for the learning and teaching of the use of synonyms.
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