A Corpus-based Study Of Lexical Collocational Errors In Senior High School English Writing

Listening, speaking, reading and writing are the basic skills of English. Writing can reflect the students’ English comprehensive ability. For the learners in senior high school, they make most errors in writing. In so many writing errors, lexical collocational errors are often made by Chinese learners. Recently, more and more people pay attention to the teaching of lexical collocations. At the same time, there are many studies about the English compositions in senior high school, but there are few about the lexical collocational errors in English composition of senior high school. Therefore, the author did an empirical study on lexical collocational errors in senior high school English writing based on corpus. According to the research results, the author concludes the frequency of lexical collocational errors in senior high school English writing and the causes for these errors. And the author gives some teaching suggestions finally.136 English compositions written by students in the Eleventh of Shenyang Senior High School are collected. The author establishes a corpus named SH-WRITING by herself based on these compositions. She analyzes these data with lexical collocation theory and error analysis theory. According to the results searched by Antconc3.2.1 and the help of the website and dictionaries, the author searches 2006 lexical collocations. Through the analysis of these collocations, the author finds out 718 lexical collocational errors in total. These errors are classified into six types based on Hausmann’s classification, they are: noun+verb collocational errors, adjective+noun collocational errors, noun+noun collocational errors, verb+adverb collocational errors, adverb+adjective collocational errors and verb+noun collocational errors. Among them verb+noun collocational errors are made most frequently, accounting for 41.4%. According to this study, the author points out six causes for these collocational errors, and gives some suggestions about lexical collocations teaching.