| Writing is widely acknowledged as one of the four language skills, but is usuallyconsidered to be the most difficult one. Teachers and students have realized theimportance of writing in English language teaching (ELT), and have made mucheffort. However, despite the great effort, writing is still the most difficult part for bothteachers and students. Students make many mistakes in writing. Lexical errors are oneof the most common mistakes that Chinese learners commit.Based on the collected data, most of the researches carried out concerning lexicalerrors by domestic researchers took intermediate or advanced learners, such as collegenon-English majors or English majors as the subjects, or senior high school students;On the contrary, few researches took junior high school students as subjects. As theytook junior high school students as subjects, most of them set their focus on all typesof errors in their compositions and analyze the reasons for each of them. What is more,few domestic researchers have ever studied junior high school students’ lexical errorsin the cognitive perspective. Therefore, the author conducts a study on junior highschool students’ writing, with the purpose of finding out the pedagogical implicationsof English writing in junior high school, and improving students’ writing ability.Thus, the author proposes the following two questions:1. What is the nature of junior high school students’ lexical errors in Englishcompositions in the light of cognitive linguistics?2. What types of lexical errors are there in junior high school students’ Englishcompositions from the perspective of the frame theory?With the questions, the author conducts the research. The author takes280GradeEight students from Guangzhou Foreign Language School as subjects. The datacollection lasts for4months. During the period, the author gives the students sixtopics to write compositions, and selects5samples from each topic, so there are30samples for lexical analysis. With Error Analysis, Transfer, and Frame theory as theoretical guidance, adopting introspective and exploratory method as researchmethod, the author identifies and analyzes the lexical errors from the cognitiveperspective. The author finds that there are201lexical errors, but the author analyzeserrors in the perspective of cognitive motivation, so just two types of errors are takeninto consideration: False Friends and words not appropriate for the frame. Theresearch shows that False Friends are more frequently produced than words notappropriate for the frame. There are many reasons for errors: False Friends areattributed to negative transfer of mother tongue, and the reasons for words notappropriate for the frame are that students do not understand the conception of theframe well, that is, they do not know the topics of compositions well, and use somewords not relevant for the topic. As a result, the deviation of theme is caused. Anotherreason is that students do not master the words so that they use words not belonging tothe frame. Besides those, lack of input, mechanical memorizing andgrammar-translation teaching method are also the reasons for lexical errors.According to the research, the writer offers some suggestions for English writing,including clarifying the objective of English writing, using proper strategy instruction,putting emphasis on intrinsic motivation, encouraging students to read extensively,and trying best to systematically introduce knowledge of vocabulary. |
