Non-English Majors' Strategies Of Word Selection In Their Compositions

As the results of CET4 and CET6 for Non-English majors show, their writing is very poor. Many scholars present many ways to improve the students' writing ability, but most of the researches aim to resolve the problem above the lexical level. There are limited studies on the students' strategy uses and their lexical characteristics. This thesis tries to analyze the strategies adopted by the students to solve their lexical problems in writing, and then makes some suggestions for lexical teaching.Three research questions are formulated in this thesis. Firstly, to what extent the students can use the words that should be mastered at the level of College English Band 4 (CEB4) according to the College English Teaching Syllabus (GETS) when they write? Secondly, what strategies do the students adopt to select words in their writing? Thirdly, what are the effects of the strategy uses on their lexical characteristics? Methods of error analysis (EA) and questionnaire are adopted for the investigation to find the answers to the above questions. The author collects 140 Non-English majors' compositions from six different universities and Wuhan Testing Center. And he distributes 75 questionnaires in four universities and gets 74 questionnaires back.The author finds that very few CEB4 words at college level appear in the students' compositions and the errors in them are caused not only by their low English proficiency but also by their strategy uses to select words in writing. The strategies are mainly avoidance, mental translation, paraphrase, transfers, coinage, and retention of some linguistic chunks. The strategies lead to three diction characteristics in their compositions. Firstly, the students' vocabulary size for writing is very small, and they cannot use many words they have learned at college. Secondly, there are lots of negative transfers in their compositions. Thirdly, they pay little attention to the writing styles in employing the strategies to select words in their writing.The author thinks that training of the strategies is not always useful to improve the students' writing ability. Teachers and learners should create authentic and meaningful context for lexical learning. One efficient way is to master the words through extensivereading. As to teaching methods, "Lexical Approach" may be efficient to lessen the similar errors in some degree; "Grammar-Translation", though out of date, can help learners to get aware of the differences and similarities between Chinese and English as well as between the two cultures.The author points out the methodological limitations in the research and makes suggestion for the future study in the latter part of the thesis.