An Analysis Of Lexical Errors Of English Writing In Senior High School

Writing is an effective way to check students' thoughts of using written language, which requires the knowledge of language, such as grammar, vocabulary, and the culture of the target language, especially for the support of the vocabulary. Wilkins, a famous British linguist, once said “people can not convey a lot of things without grammar; people are unable to express anything without lexis.” Vocabulary is the carrier of the information. Students' abilities to understand vocabulary affects the depth and accuracy of their understanding of the information. It is obvious that vocabulary plays a very important role in writing. The vocabulary is the basic organizational materials of writing. In the process of writing, the comprehension and usage of vocabulary is one of the standards to measure the quality of a composition. However, for the second language learners, errors are inevitable during the process of writing, especially lexical errors which often occupy a large proportion. In China, many experts and scholars have made a research on the errors in students' writing, but the study of lexical errors is mostly based on university students and high levels of English learners, while there is little research on lexical errors in senior one students' writing.This thesis attempts to use the error analysis theory as the theoretical basis and in combination with Jiang Nan's second language vocabulary development and representation model, randomly select 90 Mid-term English examination paper of senior one students from No.1 Senior High School in Guzhen County, Anhui Province. Through the analysis of the lexical errors in the writing part, the thesis tries to analyze and discuss the following two questions:1. What are the major types of lexical errors in senior one students' writing?2. What are the possible causes of these lexical errors?Through the identification, classification and analysis of lexical errors in writing samples of senior one students, as well as the feedback information from students' interviews, the author attempts to find out the possible causes of these lexical errors, and hunt for the corresponding countermeasures to reduce the lexical errors in students' writing, in order to provide some suggestions for teachers' vocabulary teaching.The study shows that there are four main types of lexical errors in senior one students English writing. They are distortion, wrong choice of words, collocation errors, and literal translation. The causes of lexical errors are complicated, combined with the previous studies and the related models of the development and representation of L2 words in the psychological linguistics, it is concluded that the main causes of lexical errors for the second language learners are insufficient input of the target language, the established concept and semantic system based on the mother language, and inappropriate ways of English vocabulary acquisition.Through the above analysis, this thesis puts forward the corresponding suggestions on vocabulary teaching, hoping to help the English vocabulary teaching for senior one students.