A Study On Lexical Collocation Errors In Senior High School Students’ English Writing Based On Corpus

English writing ability is not only one of the four basic abilities of English learning,but also serves as an important criterion for measuring students’ comprehensive English abilities.Meanwhile,English writing is the biggest challenge for English learners.For high school students,there are endless problems in writing,and the lexical collocation error is the most common one.The lexical collocation is the most important and difficult problem that high school English teachers want to tackle,which is also the primary focus of domestic and foreign scholars and linguists.However,the subjects of their research mainly focus on advanced learners,and there is relatively little research regarding lexical collocation errors made by high school students.Based on this situation,this research analyzes the lexical collocation errors in the English compositions of the 165 senior high school students in three exams.The aim is to solve the following two problems:(1)What is the distribution of the six kinds of lexical collocation errors in the senior three students’ English writing at three exams?(2)What are the major causes for the lexical collocation errors in the English writing of senior three students?In an effort to address the problems mentioned above,the author sets up a miniature closed corpus based on the collection of the English writings of 165 senior three students from a middle school in Taiyuan City.Based on Hausmann’s(1989)six classifications of lexical collocation errors,this study is conducted through error analysis theories.First,the author converts the collected materials into TXT format,and imports them into the retrieval software Antconc 3.4.4 so as to construct a miniature closed corpus.Second,the author refers to the BNC corpus to analyze each piece of data in the self-built corpus one by one and each error is also labeled.The reference standard is the labeled errors from the authoritative Chinese Learner English Corpus(CLEC).Then,the author uses Ant Conc3.4.4 to retrieve the labels in the corpus.With the help of these statistics,the author can figure out the distribution of six lexical collocation errors in senior three students’ English writings,and sort out their characteristics according to the analysis on typical error examples.To analyze the causes of the collocation errors,the author designed the questionnaire about the lexical collocation of senior high school students.The subjects of this questionnaire are those 165 senior three students whose compositions are collected in the self-built corpus,so it can accurately analyze the causes of lexical collocation errors in students’ English writing.Research result shows that the distribution of lexical collocation errors in high school students is uneven.The types of “verb + noun”,“noun + verb”,“adjective + noun”,“adverb +adjective” “noun + noun” and “verb + adverb” collocation errors account for 39%,21%,14%,11%,9% and 6% respectively.Based on the questionnaire result,the author summarizes the causes of the lexical collocation errors from the following three aspects: language factors,such as intralingual interference and interlangual interference;students’ factors,such as students’ learning awareness and learning strategies of lexical collocation;teachers’ factors,such as teachers’ teaching awareness and teaching strategies of lexical collocation.Finally,the author puts forward three suggestions on the practical teaching,which are as follows: minimizing L1 Interference in teaching process of the collocation;raising students’ awareness and sensitivity of collocation as well as encouraging students to use English-English dictionary.