An Analysis Of Lexical Errors In Junior High School Students’ Writing

Listening, speaking, reading and writing are essential parts in the process ofEnglish learning. Among them, writing is considered to be one of the most complexprocesses. Therefore, it is not easy for the students to do it. Throughout students’composition, errors can be found easily. Among a large number of writing errors,lexical errors are one of the most common in the students’ writing. No matter howhard the teachers and students try in practice, errors always seem difficult to avoid. Asa result, to solve the error is becoming increasingly important in students’ writing.Lexical meaning plays a crucial role in English writing. The utilization of lexicalmeaning decides whether the students’ composition is good or not. Meanwhile, in thepast, although many English writing errors have been studied, lexical meaning errorsin the writing are still not so well. Therefore, this article attempts to do some researchon lexical meaning errors appearing in students’ writing. The research questions are asfollow:A. What are the major types of lexical meaning errors in students’ Englishwriting?B. What are the main reasons for these errors?Legenhausen (1975) divided lexical error into: forms error and meaning errors.Based on the error analysis, language transfer theory and the lexical errors theory,drawing Legenhausen (1975) classification, the author analyzes the lexical meaningerrors appearing in the collected268English composition of the junior high schoolstudents. First, the author marks out all the errors, corrects them and classifies theminto two categories: confusion of lexical relationship and collocation errors. Theconfusion of lexical relationship contains the misusage of the hyponymy as well ashyperonym and the misusage of synonymy. While the collocation errors are as follow:Verb+Noun, Adj+Noun, Noun+Verb, Noun+Noun, Adv+Adj,Verb+Adv and Noun ofnoun collocation errors. The research result shows that: there are1279errorsappearing in students’ compositions. Among these1279errors,678errors belong tolexical errors, accounted for53.01%. And among the678lexical errors,317are form errors, accounted for46.76%, while361belong to the lexical meaning errors,accounted for53.24%. And then it can be found out that among361lexical meaningerrors, the number of errors about confusion of vocabulary relationship is87,accounted for24.10%, while there are274collocation errors, accounted for75.90%.After the text analysis, the author finds that the main reasons include negativetransfer, the deviation of parts of the speech knowledge, incomplete meaning, thewrong teaching methods and the improper learning strategies. In fact, sometimes thecause of error is not a single, but for several reasons. Basing on these reasons, somesuggestions are given. Firstly, reduce the negative transfer of mother tongue; Secondly,teachers should compare the difference of similar words and increase the input oflanguage; Last but not the least, encourage students to look up words with Englishdictionary. It is hope that the vocabulary errors can be minimized and the students’writing skills can be improved by the concerted efforts of teachers and students.In this study, there are some inadequacies in the analysis of them. For example:the sample is not big enough, the recommendations made by a little difficult in theactual implementation. These deficiencies will be researched in the follow-up study.