Analysis Of Lexical Errors In Vocational College Non-English Majors’ English Practical Writing

Vocabulary is the basic writing material and plays an important role in writing. How English learners master and use vocabulary in writing is one of the criterions for their English writing, and lexical errors usually accounts for a large proportion in all of the writing errors. Over these years there are a lot of experts and scholars have done many researches and analysis on writing errors, however, most of the objects for lexical errors researching are the writings of English major or non-English major college students and rarely are the English practical writings of higher vocational college students.This thesis tries to use the theory of error analysis as the theoretical basis and randomly choose a composition topic from a test of the Practical English Test for Colleges.90non-English major higher vocational college students are the subjects of this experimental study. The following three questions are discussed in the thesis:(1) what are the major types of lexical errors in the students’practical English writing?(2) What are the causes of these lexical errors?(3) What are the vocabulary learning and teaching implications and suggestions? By collecting, classifying and analyzing the lexical errors and collecting the feedback information from the questionnaire and interview, the writer tries to hunt for the potential causes of these errors, so as to find the countermeasures to reduce or eliminate the lexical errors and offer some suggestions for teachers in the practical writing vocabulary teaching to take effective teaching methods and strategies of error correction in order to improve the students’practical writing ability.The result showed that there are many types of lexical errors, and mainly included misformation, distortion, wrong choice of words, collocational errors and literal translation. The causes are complex and the main errors are due to interlingual cause intralingual cause, and the interference from cultural customs. Through the analysis and discussion in this thesis, the writer provided some advices for teachers and students of English vocabulary teaching and learning. As for the vocabulary teaching, the writer suggested that teachers should pay attention to practical English writing teaching and strengthen the basic lexical knowledge teaching, increasing the input and various output of lexical knowledge and adopting the proper attitude and strategies to treat and correct errors, as well as providing some vocabulary learning strategies and methods for learners.