| Writing is a crucial skill for English as a Foreign Language(EFL)learners,and is a key dimension for measuring their language proficiency.The English Curriculum Standards for Compulsory Education(2022 edition)provide clear and specific requirements for junior high school students in writing.However,Chinese students’ English writing often contains lexical errors that hinder their English language development.Unfortunately,the current situation of writing instruction in junior high school is not encouraging,and students frequently make various lexical errors in their English writing.Therefore,the question of how to systematize the various lexical errors made by students in English writing and turn them into valuable resources for future students to learn become a hot topic that scholars and English teachers have been focusing on.While there is significant corpus-based research on college and high school writing,there are fewer studies focused on the junior high school level.This study seeks to address this gap by combining qualitative research and quantitative research and using a self-built corpus and interviews from teachers and students to investigate the writing errors of junior high school students.This study analyzed the writing errors of the students and attempted to answer the following three questions:1.What is the distribution of lexical error types in the written texts of junior middle school students?2.What are the changes and differences in lexical errors among students with varying levels of proficiency in their written texts?3.What are the underlying causes of these writing errors?In this study,a total of 518 compositions were collected,including 196 texts from Grade Seven,158 essays from Grade Eight,and 164 articles from Grade Nine.To facilitate analysis,a self-built corpus was constructed containing a total of 61866 words.The texts were annotated using the CLEC corpus and the COCA corpus as references.Based on the Contrastive Interlanguage Analysis,and Error Analysis theory,and employing the error annotation method of the CLEC corpus,11 types of lexical errors were studied.In addition,teacher and student interviews were conducted and the software Ant Conc(4.0.2.0)and Range were utilized to support the analysis.Results demonstrate(1)the lexical errors in junior high school students’ English writing were mainly in four categories,including verb phrases(vp),word(wd),lexical forms(fm)and noun phrases(np),accounting for 70% of the total.(2)The number of lexical errors in junior high school students’ English writing increases with their learning stages changing;in terms of the overall quality of compositions,the number of lexical errors in high-scoring compositions in lower grades is small,but the number of lexical errors in high-scoring compositions in higher grades is higher;as to error types,errors such as collocation(cc)and syntax(sn)decrease with the increase of learning stages,but errors such as verbs(vp)and nouns(np)increase.(3)The underlying causes of these errors are interlinguistic transfer,intralinguistic transfer,and other non-linguistic and psychological factors.Based on the results and analysis of this study,the following pedagogical insights were drawn:(1)During the process of English instruction,teachers should consciously help students in the lower grades to eliminate collocation and syntactic errors,while focusing on verbal and noun writing errors for the upper grades.(2)Considering the dynamic relationship between lexical errors and the overall quality of compositions,writing instruction in middle school should avoid overemphasizing the accuracy of vocabulary usage,pay more attention to writing fluency,and actively encourage students’ output. |
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