A Corpus-based Study On Lexical Collocation Of Senior High School Students' English Writings

Writing is an important form of language output and an important way of communication and cultural exchange.For the second language acquisition,the study of lexical collocation has been accepted by a considerable number of scholars for improving the accuracy and naturalness of language output.Both National English Curriculum Standards of Senior English(2017)and China's Standards of English Language Ability have made certain requirements for the usage of collocation.However the situation of lexical collocation in senior high school students' English writing is still not optimistic.There exists many phenomena that words take the inappropriate diction,lexical collocation is not appropriate and even the collocation is wrong.It's very unidiomatic and unnatural.Through reading a large number of lexical collocation studies in English writing both at home and abroad,the author found that most researchers selected advanced English learners as the research objects,such as university students of English majors or non-English majors.In terms of studying lexical collocation of senior high school students is far fewer.What's more,the current studies of collocations are mainly about collocation errors,comprehensive study of appropriate collocation,inappropriate collocation and collocation errors in English writing is also fewer.Therefore,this research studies the lexical collocation of senior high school students from three dimensions: appropriate collocation,inappropriate collocation and collocation errors.This study selects English writings of senior high school students in Zhangzhou city from senior one to senior three as subjects.By collecting 324(108 of each grade)pieces of time-limited compositions with the same topic as a self-built corpus data for lexical collocation study and analyzing it with AntConc,BFSU Collocator,CQPweb corpus analysis software and SPSS data statistical software,the research adopts the method of combining quantitative and qualitative analysis and tries to explore the following three questions:(1)How about the general lexical collocation of senior high school students?(2)Is there any difference in lexical collocation among students of different grades? If so,is it significant?(3)What are the common lexical collocation problems in students' writing?The research results show that:(1)the general situation of lexical collocation in students' writing is relatively good,but the situation of improper collocation and collocation errors are also very prominent;(2)there is no significant difference between appropriate collocation and inappropriate collocation in terms of lexical collocation in different grades.However,the number of collocation errors is obviously different among different grades,which is mainly reflected in the number between the senior one and the senior three.With the increase of grades,the number of collocation errors is significantly reduced.There is no significant difference in the number of collocation errors between senior one and senior two and between senior two and senior three;(3)the common lexical collocation problems in students' writing are as follows: inter-lingual errors: interference of mother tongue,intra-lingual errors,excessive generalization,words misuse and synonym confusion.From the research results of this study,it can be seen that the inappropriate lexical collocation in students' writing is very prominent,and the collocation errors are also obvious.Therefore,the author suggests that:(1)To further strengthen the basic words teaching,pay attention to the lexical collocation of common words,and improve the teachers and students' awareness of lexical collocation;(2)The teachers should encourage students to use a double-English dictionary and should teach lexical collocation by comparing Chinese and English;(3)The teachers should introduce the data-driven teaching mode into the classroom and help students to broaden the channels of learning resources acquisition.