A Corpus-based Study On The Vocabulary Errors In The Writings Of Chinese EFL Learners And Its Pedagogical Implications

Learners will inevitably make some errors in their course of second language acquisition. It is of great significance to study on these errors both to the researchers and the learners. Meanwhile, as a new research approach in applied linguistics, corpus approach is being employed more and more widely in language researches since the application of advanced computer and the emergence of enormous text corpus and well-designed concordance software. In 2003, the largest learner corpus in China, Chinese Learner English Corpus (CLEC) was published. It is of great significance to corpus-based linguistics research in China. By adopting Error Analysis and corpus linguistics, this thesis is intended to investigate the characteristics of Chinese EFL learners'vocabulary errors based on CLEC and to attempt to provide some tentative explanations for these errors.The analysis shows that the highest percentages of vocabulary error occurrences are shown as the category of errors in substitution, absence and part of speech. The causes of these vocabulary errors are complex. The negative transfer of the Chinese EFL learners' mother tongue, intralingual factors, induced errors and other kinds of possible causes all contribute to these errors. Based on the correlations analysis, we may infer that there is a close relationship between the quantity of the vocabulary errors and the learners' proficiency level. To be more specific, the fewer vocabulary errors there are in the composition, the higher proficiency a learner is at.At last, this thesis provides the following implications for the vocabulary learning and teaching:To begin with, English teachers in China should pay more attention to vocabulary in their teaching. Special attention should be paid to the vocabulary errors and employ Error Analysis to facilitate English teaching. Second, the teachers should raise the students' awareness of the negative transfer and encourage the positive transfer by teaching English in comparison with Chinese. Third, they may utilize corpus in the process of vocabulary teaching. Fourth, the teachers should also encourage the students to read more, writing more, correct more and think more so as to make progress in the course of correcting their own errors.