An Analysis On Lexical Errors In Senior High School Students’ Writing

Writing is an essential skill in English learning. Writing can reflect the students’ comprehensive ability to use the language and how well the learners learn English vocabulary. However, students can not learn a language without making mistakes. In recent decades, there are quantity of researches on writing errors, such as coherence errors, syntactic errors and grammar-lexical errors. Concerning the researches related to senior high school students’ lexical errors, most researchers laid their emphasis on some specific type of lexical errors in the students’ writings. Few researches have ever identified the lexical errors in senior high school students’ writings. This study attempts to find out lexical errors committed in subjects’ writings and categorize the lexical errors, explore the possible causes of the errors, with the hoping of putting forward some helpful suggestion for English learning.Based on error analysis, language transfer and lexical learning and teaching, this study collected 60 sample writings written by Grade One students from Maqiu senior high school, Jiangxi province. This study concentrates on the frequent lexical errors in senior high school students’ writings:(1)What are the major types of lexical errors in Chinese senior high school students’ writings?(2) What are the causes of the lexical errors committed in Chinese senior high school students’ writings?Based on James’ lexical errors classification(1998), two types of lexical errors were classified: formal errors and semantic errors. Both of them can be grouped into several subtypes. Among the three subtypes of formal errors, formal misselection accounted for 43.7%. As for the subtypes of semantic errors, collocation errors account for 62.5% of semantic errors. Negative transfer of mother tongue,inappropriate vocabulary teaching and learning strategies are the main causes leading to lexical errors. The author puts forward some implications on how to avoid formal errors and semantic errors for both teachers and students.