An Analysis Of Lexical Errors In High School Students Composition

Among the four language communication skills, writing is the most important butdifficult one to train and to gain. Our teaching experience is that if a student is able tobring his/her English knowledge into writing, he or she has acquired the ability to acertain level and is able to apply it well.Also, we found in our teaching practice, students, who are good at writing Englishcomposition, usually maintain their test scores high and stable. The reasons for this arethat they possess rich vocabulary, know the habitual way of the English expression, usevarious English sentences flexibly, choose words properly and express themselvesbriefly and accurately. Some top students even can write a beautiful English essay to acertain level.Important as the English writing ability is to high school students, we Englishteachers have been trying to enhance the English composition teaching, so as toimprove students overall English ability and the high school English teaching efficiency.However, we found many students have difficulty in writing. They write monotonoussentences, messy statements, and use loose structures, simple words. They make variouskinds of mistakes in their compositions. In particular, lexical errors are common andserious.In order to identify the characteristics and causes of the lexical errors in students’compositions, we adopt the empirical research method to analyze the lexical errorproblem from the following two aspects:(1) What and how many kinds of lexical errors frequently appear in students’composition writing?(2) What are the causes of lexical errors in students’ composition writing?On the basis of analyzing empirically118compositions of high school students, wefound that the lexical errors could be identified as follows: word class errors, spellingerrors and word choice errors.We conclude that the causes of the lexical errors in the high school students’composition as follow: students are greatly influenced by their mother tongue. Thevocabulary learning is isolated and unassociated to the context or the daily life and soon.Finally, in this thesis we put forward the methods of improving high school Englishvocabulary teaching: amend the misconception principle of vocabulary learning forstudents; guide the students to summarize and follow up the rules of pronunciation;avoid the negative transfer of Chinese; expand related vocabulary knowledge.