The Concept, Characteristics And Bias Analysis Of High School Students' Second Language Vocabulary Acquisition

Second Language Vocabulary Acquisition has gradually become a heated issue in Second Language Acquisition research field, and also a difficult one to many language learners since the 1970s. The well-known British linguist Wilkins(1972) once pointed out,"Without grammar, one cannot express many things; without words, one cannot express anything." Vocabulary is the core of foreign language teaching in high school. In General Curriculum of English in Senior High School (2012; trial), the requirements for vocabulary on each level are clarified, which require teachers to develop students' vocabulary learning strategies and cultivate the habits of using them while acquiring vocabulary, It's easy to see that the L2 lexical acquisition becomes the core of current researches and official requirements. Therefore, it will definitely benefit the learners' vocabulary learning and surely expand their size and depth of their vocabulary by investigating a certain group of learners and analyzing their ideas to L2 vocabulary learning, the features and errors occurred in second language acquisition.In this thesis, 60 senior-high-school students learning English were chosen at the participants. Based on the statistical analysis of the questionnaire, the ideas and features in acquiring L2 vocabulary were discussed, and error analysis was carried out on the basis of 60 writing samples for the classification of their errors. The conclusions were obtained as follows:(1) The students know the importance of vocabulary learning, and don't pay enough attention to some strategies for vocabulary learning advocated by their teachers. Although the students start to pay attention to the basic forms and meanings of the acquired vocabulary, they also realize the influence caused by their mother tongue.(2) The features presented by the students in acquiring vocabulary include: learning English words by direct English-Chinese translation,root-memorizing the words by taking the new words list as the only source, and they focus more on the concepts of new words than on the cultural backgrounds and connotations.(3) The errors occurred have two types: inter-lingual errors and intra-lingual errors.The inter-lingual errors mainly involve plural and singular forms of nouns; misuse of verbs, articles and part of speech. The intra-lingual errors includes the grammatically correct expressions with improper words; words unsuitable for the customs of the target language and unclearly defined words.