An Investigation Into Lexical Misuses By Chinese College Students Under The Negative Influence Of Their First Language

Vocabulary is a very important part in second language acquisition. Due to the influence of grammar-oriented theory, the study of vocabulary learning lag behind compared with the research of grammar and phonetics. Now it draws more and more attention from researchers, teachers and others involved in second language learning. However, most researches emphasize the importance of quantity of vocabulary and focus on how to enlarge the student's vocabulary size, which generates another problem, i.e. the depth or quality of the students' vocabulary is overlooked.At the intermediate stage, the Chinese college EFL learners are apt to misuse English vocabulary under the influence of the LI. The researcher presents a qualitative study of college EFL learners' interlanguage vocabulary and explains how they are influenced negatively by the LI from semantic and cognitive point of view. Sample sentences with lexical misuses are collected from the data of the EFL learners' corpus and they are sorted and analyzed on the English-Chinese contrastive basis. The misuses are discussed from five respects: misuses caused by non-correspondence in semantic structure between English and Chinese; misuses caused by different collocations of semantically corresponding words; misuses caused by different syntactic usages of semantically corresponding words; misuses caused by different lexicalization patterns of LI and L2 and misuses caused by different ways of metonymy. The analysis of the data reveals the causes of the misuses and mismatches, different lexical characteristics of LI and L2, and different cognitive viewpoints.