An Analysis Of Lexical Errors Non-English Majors’ Writings

According to the College English Curriculum Requirements (2004:7-9),“thebasic requirements are the minimum level that all non-English majors have to reachbefore graduation”. As for writing,“students should be able to complete writing tasksfor general purposes, e.g., describing personal experiences, impressions, feelings, orsome events, and to undertake practical writing. They should be able to write within30minutes a short composition of120words on a general topic or an outline. Thecomposition should be basically complete in content, appropriate in diction andcoherent in discourse. Students are expected to be able to have a command of basicwriting strategies”. Based on the basic requirements and the real teaching practice, theauthor finds that writing has become the most difficult and challenging skill in thestudents’ learning process, especially for the non-English majors in the agriculturaluniversities. Because of their poor English level and the fact that they invest most oftheir time in their majors, writing has become the most important factor affecting theirpassing rate in the CET-4, and furthermore affecting their English level.Errors in students’ writings have aroused many teachers’ and researchers’attention. Error analysis reassesses the errors committed by learners in the secondlanguage learning. It takes errors as a natural fact that inevitably appears in theprocess of second language acquisition. Error analysis first appeared in1960s and TheSignificance of Learners’ Errors (Corder,1967) opened windows to the research insecond language acquisition. English teachers can have a general idea of how well thestudents master the language by analyzing the errors, while learners can also improvetheir English level by having a clear mind about their errors.All the subjects are the first-year non-English majors from QingdaoAgricultural University. The subjects were divided into three groups according to theirEnglish achievements: the first one third (40) subjects were identified as the highgroup, the latter one third (40) belonged to the low group and the other (also40)subjects were regarded as the moderate group. As is known to all, their English levelgoes to two extremes. On the one hand, there are some excellent students, who studyvery hard and stand out from the other students, attempting to improve their presentlife, but unfortunately, they only take a small proportion. On the other hand, with theuniversity enrolling students from all through the country, there are so many studentswhose English is very poor and they only have a small vocabulary, some even knowvery little about the basic grammar in English. This phenomenon can be seen fromstudents’ scores in their college entrance examination. After two years’ study, studentsare supposed to participate in the CET-4. According to the survey, their passing rate iscomparatively low than that in the other comprehensive universities. In addition,among the students who passed the CET-4, there is a big gap in their achievements ineach part, only30%students got a passing grade in their writings.The samples in this research come from a CET-4model test composition entitled“Taking Part in School Activities” written by her students from three classes. Thesubjects were required to compose an essay about campus activities in no less than120words within30minutes and the whole process of writing is supervised by the English teacher and students are not allowed to consult any dictionaries. After that, allthe students handed in their compositions and120compositions, altogether17305words, were to be used in this research. The researcher graded the compositions andclarified all these errors. According to the classification of errors made by GuiShichun and Yang Huizhong (2003) in Chinese Learner English Corpus (CLEC), thewriter probed into errors in form and lexicon. For the sake of convenience, theresearcher regards the two types of errors as lexical errors, including spelling, wordorder, part of speech, substitution, absence, redundancy, repetition and ambiguity. Byreading these compositions carefully for many times, the writer marked these errorswith sp, wd1, wd2, wd3, wd4, wd5, wd6and wd7and analyzed them with the help ofExcel and SPSS17.0. It is discovered that there is no significant difference in thenumber of words between the groups, but the number of errors made by each group isquite different; redundancy is in positive correlation with order, absence and repetition;substitution is in negative correlation with absence; absence is in positive correlationwith ambiguity; among these errors, spelling, substitution and absence occur mostfrequently, especially spelling. Possible reasons will be explored and the writerattributes students’ errors mainly to the interference of learners’ mother tongue(Chinese, to be exact). And students’ incapability of English grammar is another mainfactor leading to these errors. Finally, by discussion, the writer attempts to offer someteaching strategies, in hope of being helpful for the teaching of English writing.