An Analysis Of Lexical Errors In Senior High School Students' English Writing

The study of errors in second language writing has always been an important component of error studies. The analysis of writing errors will help improve the learner's writing proficiency. Lexical error is one type of errors frequently occurring in English writing of Chinese learners. According to the collected data, most of the researches carried out concerning lexical errors by domestic researchers took intermediate or advanced learners, such as college non-English or English majors as the subjects; while on the contrary, few took senior high school students as the subjects. As for those several researches concerned about senior high school students'lexical errors, most of them set their focus on some specific type of errors in the subjects'compositions. Few domestic researchers have ever studied senior high school students'lexical errors in terms of errors'categories. Therefore, the author conducts an empirical study on Senior High School students'writing, with the purpose of finding out the major types and distribution of these errors, thereby seeking the underlying sources and ways of prevention.This thesis, with Error Analysis (EA), Contrastive Analysis (CA), and Interlanguage (IL) as its theoretical guidance, analyzes 100 sample compositions written in the same period of time and of the same topic by Grade Three students in Xincai No.1 Senior High School, Henan Province. Altogether 439 lexical errors are identified. Then, a classification as well as a description of the errors is made first, followed by a discussion of the possible reasons for the lexical errors, which is mainly elaborated from three aspects:1. What are most commonly committed lexical errors in their writing? How are these lexical errors distributed?2. What are the possible causes of learners'lexical errors?3. What are the pedagogical implications of the study on Chinese ELT?The analysis shows that among the four types of lexical errors, spelling errors are the most frequent, followed by collocational errors and literal translation, while the wrong choice of words is comparably not so frequent. Concerning spelling errors, omission and overinclusion are the most common. Confusion of sense of relationship and that of part of speech are also frequent with respect to wrong choice of words. Collocational errors in preposition make up a high proportion of collocational errors.The causes of lexical errors are complicated. Spelling errors mainly result from mispronunciation and overgeneralization of the rules; wrong choice of words is caused by false analogy, communication strategies, negative transfer of the mother tongue, and failure to tell the differences between forms with similar pronunciation or spelling. Collocational errors are attributed to mother tongue interference, overextension of analogy and incomplete knowledge of the TL structure. Mother tongue interference and communication strategies are responsible for literal translation. In addition, learning by rote, the low frequency of input and grammar-translation teaching method also lead to lexical errors.Following the analysis and discussion, the author proposes corresponding suggestions from several aspects, including teaching vocabulary in context, helping students to form good learning habits, namely, using proper dictionaries, reading widely, reading aloud and recitation,correcting errors, etc.Hopefully, the study will be of help to both language teachers and language learners in senior high schools.