A Study On Lexical Errors In Junior High School Students' English Writing

As the language output skills activities,writing's position in English teaching of junior high school is obvious.Vocabulary in students' writing occupies an important position.The ability to applying vocabulary is one of the main criteria to measure the quality of students' English composition.English Curriculum Standards of Compulsory Education(2011)has a clear request for junior high school students,who should master one thousand and six hundred words and two to three hundred English idioms.Vocabulary is also the key of a variety of tests.As a result,vocabulary occupies plenty of time in classroom and extracurricular time.However,students still make various lexical errors in English writings.The author had a four-month work placement with Xinxiang No.10 Junior High School since September,2017.It is observed that students can not use the correct words accurately in the process of English writings.They often make mistakes when they use words.Students employing vocabulary inaccurately impedes the correct use of words and interest in learning English.Therefore,this study finds out the causes of lexical errors to help students overcome the difficulties in vocabulary learning by using vocabulary learning strategies.The author made careful investigations of the main types and causes of lexical errors through questionnaire,English compositions.On the basis of the error analysis,contrast analysis and interlanguage theory,the author carries out a study on the main types and possible sources of lexical errors in junior high school and the subjects of the study are 112 students from Xinxiang No.10 Junior High School.This paper analyzes the students' compositions and designs a questionnaire for students.On this basis,we try to analyze and discuss from the following two aspects:(1)What are the major types of lexical errors of junior high school students' English compositions?(2)What are the main causes for these lexical errors?In order to find out the causes of the lexical errors,this paper analyzes the lexical errors appearing in the collected 112 English compositions of junior high school students.First,the author marks out all the errors of 112 English compositions in the final examination,which are written by the students in Grade Three from Xinxiang No.10 Junior High School.Besides,the 112 English compositions are collected randomly.Through the English compositions,lexical errors account for the highest proportion in students' compositions.The main types of lexical errors in the collected compositions are form errors,collocation errors and parts of speech misuses.Formal errors rank the first in lexical errors,followed by collocation errors and misuse of parts of speech.Distortion is the most common in the formal errors.In the misuse of parts of speech,the types of verbs that misuse nouns are more common than other types.The mismatch of verbs and nouns accounts for a higher proportion of collocation errors.The result of English compositions illustrate that there are many sources bring about lexical errors.The main reasons for formal errors are pronunciation errors,excessive generalization of phonetic rules.The negative effects of native language parts of speech and the poor expression ability of parts of speech are the reasons for the misuse of parts of speech.The main causes of collocation errors are negative transfer of vocabulary and incomplete collocation.Through the analysis of the questionnaire,it is found that the causes of students' vocabulary errors include improper vocabulary learning strategies and habits,negative attitude towards vocabulary errors and lack of writing practice.Through the analysis of students' vocabulary errors,the study on lexical errors has some implications for junior high school's English vocabulary teaching in which teachers are able to help students to sum up phonetic rules by cultivating students' positive attitude towards errors.Vocabulary teaching in context encourages students to read widely and to employ appropriate dictionaries to improve the efficiency of vocabulary teaching.Based on the research,we found that the author gets the following inspiration to the daily teaching: guide students to face their lexical errors with positive attitude;increase language input,attach importance to increase the accumulation of language knowledge through recitation and so on;strengthen vocabulary teaching,provide the guidance;offer students writing strategy guidance,cultivate good writing habits;fully rely on teaching materials,make best of teaching materials,promote English writing teaching in muti-angle ways;to treat errors in English writing positively.