| Researches in second language acquisition indicate that Chinese English learner’s language errors are mainly found in the lexical aspect. These lexical errors include confusion in word meaning, ungrammatical collocation, irregular word spelling and incorrect word pronunciation. To tackle this problem, word discrimination has become an indispensible constituent in the contemporary mainstream English learner’s dictionaries. Although linguistic studies in word discrimination have made substantial progress in the past twenty years, and there witnessed continuous improvements in word discrimination method, constant optimization of the lexicographic representation, and an ever-increasing quantity of the word discrimination cluster in ECLDs, it is worth mentioning these perfections concerns primarily English near-synonyms, holding word confusion caused by near-synonyms as the sole problem for Chinese English learners. In fact, Chinese EFL learners’ problem in discriminating English words is not restricted to the semantic level, lexical confusions are also seen in phonetic, morphological, and syntactic aspects. Also, in lexicographical practice, lexicographers and linguists share no agreement on the standard of selecting confusable words in dictionaries, research in the relevant field still lies a vacancy. In light of the deficiencies, this thesis launched an empirical survey from the very perspective of confusable English lexical items by collecting some concrete Chinese-specific confusable synophone clusters, quasi-homograph clusters, and near-synonym clusters. By analyzing the intrinsic features of these confusable word clusters, the thesis probed into the interlanguage error mechanism in second language acquisition and came up with a series of innovative principles and standards for the selection and inclusion of Chinese-specific confusable word clusters in English learner’s dictionaries. |
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