A Study Of Misuse Of Parts Of Speech In English Majors’ Writings From Bilingual Mental Lexicon Perspective

Part of speech of a word refers to its category and properties. Because of the interlingual,intralingual, psychological and cognitive factors, students often commit errors on parts ofspeech in writing. This thesis attempts to conduct a longitudinal study on misuse of parts ofspeech from the perspective of bilingual mental lexicon based on a self-established corpus.Through statistics and analysis of this kind of error from79English majors in six terms, itaims to show the characteristics of misuse of parts of speech and further explore therelationship between these errors and bilingual mental lexicon. Research results show thatfrequencies of misuse of parts of speech do not decrease with the rise of grade. The change offrequencies in six terms is not linear but with great fluctuation. In addition, the types ofmisuse in six terms keep the same in general, which mainly concentrates on the open-classwords,namely, misuse of adjective, misuse of noun, misuse of verb and misuse of adverb.Through the subdivision of the four types, it is found that the confusion of adjectives andnouns is beyond other misuse types in six terms while misuse of other parts of speech presentdifferent characteristics respectively. Finally, this thesis explores the psychological factorsbehind these errors from the perspectives of Spreading Activation Model and three stages ofvocabulary acquisition and then puts forward corresponding suggestions on vocabularyteaching and learning. It is hoped that vocabulary and writing competence of Chinese Englishlearners can be improved.