An Analysis Of Lexical Errors In Ethnic-Minority College Students' English Writings

As for English learners, errors are inevitable in their English writings; especiallythe lexical errors make a large proportion among the whole errors. There are so manystudies concerning lexical errors, but most studies set Han students as subjects andrarely involve in ethnic-minority students. Compared with the Han students,ethnic-minority students are very different in the study of English since they are besetwith difficulties of three languages together, such as, mother tongue, Chinese andEnglish. Moreover, there are not many researches on lexical errors committed by theethnic-minority students. Due to these reasons, this study investigates the lexical errorscommitted by the ethnic-minority students in Changji College. The purpose of the studywas to explore the underlying sources of lexical errors and get some usefulpedagogical implications for English teaching and learning in the future.This study is conducted by collecting students' compositions written by54English majors from Changji College. Altogether150of the copies are valid. Theauthor develops the study by making a classification as well as a description of theerrors first. Then two instruments are used in the survey: one is questionnaire and theother is interview. The content of the survey includes the overall pattern of Englishvocabulary learning strategies and the underlying sources of lexical errors. This thesis,with Error Analysis (EA), Contrastive Analysis (CA), Interlanguage (IL) and learningstrategies as its theoretical guidance, tries to explore the following three questions:1) What are the major categories of lexical errors in the students'compositions?2) What is the overall frequency of vocabulary learning strategies employed byethnic minority students?3) What are the underlying sources of learners' lexical errors?The results of the study show:1) The main types of lexical errors in ethnic minority students' writing are spelling errors, wrong choice of words and collocational errors. Among the threetypes of lexical errors, spelling errors are the most frequent, followed by the wrongchoice of words, while collocational errors are comparatively not so frequent.Concerning spelling errors, they are mainly overinclusion, omission, lettermisselection, misordering. The wrong choice of words include formal misselection,confusion of sense relations (errors in synforms), and mix-up of part of speech(misusing adjectives as adverbs or vice versa). Collocational errors mainly refer toverb-noun collocation errors and preposition errors.2) After the data were collected, processed and analyzed with SPSS17.0, mostparticipants, generally speaking, employ a variety of vocabulary learning strategies atmanagement and language learning dimensions. Language learning strategies aremore frequently used ones. The most frequently employed vocabulary learningstrategies are dictionary use, repetition, note-taking strategies with the popularity in adescending order, while adjustment and activation strategies are less frequently used.3) The underlying sources of lexical errors are complicated. Spelling errorsmainly result from mispronunciation, the negative transfer of mother tongue andovergeneralization of the rules; moreover, anxiety, bad memory, and carelessness canalso cause spelling errors. The wrong choice of words is caused by false analogy,negative transfer from Chinese (different parts of speech in Chinese are notdistinguished very strictly), and failure to tell the differences between forms withsimilar pronunciation or spelling. Collocational errors are attributed to Chineseinterference, overextension of analogy and incomplete knowledge of the targetlanguage (TL) structure and inappropriate vocabulary learning strategies. In addition,learning by rote and the low frequency of input also lead to lexical errors.Following the analysis and discussion, the author proposes correspondingsuggestions hoping to be of help to the ethnic minority students.