An Analysis Of Lexical Collocation Errors In Senior High School Students’ English Compositions

The English Curriculum Standards for Senior High School(2017)promulgated by the Ministry of Education of China clearly states that “the five components of listening,speaking,reading,writing and critical thinking are the language skills that students need to master.”Writing,as a productive skill,is one of the important measurements of students’ language ability.In addition,writing is made up of sentences aggregated from words,which means that words are the most basic units of English writing.According to the English Curriculum Standards for Senior High School(2017:12),“senior high school students should master2000-2100 words so as to acquire writing skills.” However,the author found that students at senior high school have not reached the level to write intelligible compositions,based on the data the author has selected from the 100 senior one students’ midterm exam compositions at the school where the author did the internship.The author discovered that lexical errors,especially collocation errors,were the most frequent problems in their compositions.Based on this phenomenon,the author decided to use the method of error analysis combined with the questionnaire to analyze the types of collocation errors and the causes of the errors in the writings of the senior one students in Xianning Tongshan County Experimental Senior High School.Based on the above phenomenon,this study will focus on exploring and addressing two questions: firstly,what are the main lexical collocation errors in senior high school students’ English writings? Secondly,what are the possible reasons for these errors? In order to solve these questions,the author took the English mid-term compositions as the research data.As for the research subjects,100 students from senior one class two and senior one class twelve were taken as the research subjects,moreover,the grades of the two classes are equal,with an even ratio of males and females.When the exams was over,the students were given questionnaire and they should fininsh it during the evening study time,thus the author can find out the real situation of their English learning,as well as their attitude toward English writing and their writing habits,which provides a strong illustration to address the second question of this study.In terms of the lexical collocation errors,there are,generally speaking,six types:noun+noun,noun+verb,verb+noun,adjective+noun,verb+adverb,and adjective+ adverb,etc.Among them,verb+noun(31%)was the most common error made by students.Secondly,interlingual interference(native language interference),intralingual interference and overgeneralizations(e.g.vocabulary misuse,ignoring the rules of word collocation,etc.),student’s learning habits and attitude towards errors,and lack of writing practice are found to be the main reasons that lead students to commit lexical collocation errors in their writings.In accordance with the author’s four-month internship teaching experience,and based on the relevant literature which comprises some promising teaching strategies and principles,the author puts forward some helpful ways to help improve students’ writing.Firstly,when teaching words,teachers should teach them in the context,so as to reduce the number of lexical collocation errors made by students due to the interference of their mother tongue.Secondly,as students are exposed to a limited English learning environment in school,teachers should encourage students to read widely so as to expand their vocabularies and thus reduce the number of errors.Finally,teachers should take a critical view of students’ errors and encourage students to develop the habit of correcting their mistakes in a timely manner.