A Study On The Word-Substitution Errors In The English Composition Of Senior High School Students And Teaching Countermeasures

Based on the theories of interlanguage and error analysis, this study is mainly to collect, describe and classify word-substitution errors in senior high school students’ writing. Word-substitution errors in this study mainly relate to the errors that students choose those words which deviate from the rules of the target language system to express he meanings they intend to convey. In addition, this study aims to find out the causes of students’ word-substitution errors by means of think-aloud.Eliminating some unrelated errors, there are 1391 word-substitution errors. The study describes and analyzes errors from two dimensions. Firstly, based on the word classes, the study finds that they are involved in nine word classes, and the number of errors from the most to the least is noun, verb, adjective, adverb, article, pronoun, preposition, conjunction and numeral. Secondly, the errors of literal translations are categorized into interlingual errors; intralingual errors which could be classified into the misuse of synonyms, synforms, superonyms, improper lexical collocation and grammatical errors. Besides, the study obtains objective and comprehensive introspective data by means of think-aloud to (?)nalyze the causes of errors comprehensively. On the one hand, errors result from students’ imited lexical knowledge and mechanical learning. On the other hand, the causes are mainly triggered by students’ incomplete lexical representation and the native language ransfer. In addition, a few students occur unnecessary errors because of carelessness and emporary memory disorders.Finally, countermeasures for English vocabulary teaching and learning are put...