An Analysis Of Lexical Errors In High School Students' Writing

The errors made by language learners can be taken as a reflection of the learning process and they are helpful for teachers to know how students learn. In order to identify the features and reasons of lexical errors in students'writing, this study collects 118 compositions written by high school students, and tries to discuss from the following two aspects: (1) What are the main types of lexical errors in students'writing? (2) What are the reasons of these errors?The results of the study show that the main types of lexical errors in high school students'writing are spelling errors, misuse of parts of speech and misselection of synonyms. The types of spelling errors are mainly misselection, omission, adding, overinclusion, blending and misordering. The reasons that students make spelling errors are: mispronunciation, misgeneralization of the phonological rule, and the students'failure to tell the difference between forms with similar pronunciation and similar spelling. The errors of misuse of parts of speech mainly happen when students misuse nouns as verbs, nouns as adjectives, adjectives as adverbs or vice versa. The reasons of this kind of errors include the following three points: firstly, students are influenced by Chinese which does not distinguish different parts of speech very strictly; secondly, students cannot use their knowledge of parts of speech correctly and proficiently; thirdly, students feel safer and more confident to use some parts of speech which they tend to use more even when it is wrong to do so. Synonyms can be divided into two groups: synonyms that are distinguished by their ways of collocation, and synonyms that distinguished by their meaning. According to this way of division, the errors of misselection of synonyms can also be divided into two groups. The main reasons of the errors of misselection of synonyms are the using of communicative strategies, the negative transfer of mother tongue and the inadequate management of some expressions.After the discussion of the data, the reasons of the lexical errors made by high school students can be concluded as the followings: the mistaken concept of vocabulary learning, separation of pronunciation and spelling, the negative transfer of Chinese, and the incompleteness of vocabulary learning. Therefore, teachers should help students to change the wrong ideas about vocabulary learning and summarize the patterns of pronunciation, try to reduce the negative transfer of Chinese, and expand the relative knowledge about the word learned.