Abstract:
Writing is an important skill in communication, but there are too many errors in Chinese college students’ writings. Making errors is no longer treated as the mark of weak learning ability, it becomes the way to provide advices for optimizing L2 learning and teaching strategy. In the past, people mainly depended on introspection and elicitation to analyze a language, but these two methods have their limitations: introspection takes those linguists as informants of language materials, and the judgment about whether a linguistic expression is right or wrong, acceptable or not is made simply according to their intuitions; elicitation makes judgment about linguistic expressions according to people’s responses to those language materials, but it requires objective field survey, and thus the scale of such an approach is rather limited. With the development of computer science, large scale corpus-based approach becomes feasible. In this article, the author took the Chinese Learner English corpus as language material informant, and selected 261 compositions with same title Getting to Know the World outside the Campus as the research objects. Through research, the author found vocabulary errors, including word form errors and word use errors, is the largest error sort and occupied 55.43% of the total lingual errors; the vocabulary error with the highest frequency is spelling error, substitution error ranks the second; there is no difference of main error types between high score and low score compositions, and their main error types are spelling error and absence error. This research also found all those vocabulary errors are closely related to the differences between Chinese and English as well as the negative transfer of Chinese. To reduce various vocabulary errors, teachers should make changes to the traditional way of vocabulary teaching and emphasize both lexical forms and their pronunciation. There is also the need to instruct students to remember and spell words according to the pronunciation rules, and to lead students to pursue the further knowledge of words. Meanwhile students should also try to contact original English material and express themselves in the target language as much as possible.

Key words: corpus; CLEC; vocabulary errors; college students’ writing

摘要：
写作是英语学习和交流的一项重要技能，而学生写作中常见的错误里词汇错误占了很大比例。错误不再被认为是学习能力差的标志，它为改进第二语言的教学提供了真实的依据。过去，人们主要使用内省法和诱导法进行语言研究，但这两种方法都有其局限性：内省法以语言学家本人作为资料提供者，仅依靠自己的语感作为判断语言现象正误、可接受性的依据；诱导法以人们对语料的反应对语言的使用做出判断，但这一方法需要做实地调查，所以在规模上受到限制。随着计算机技术的发展，大规模的基于语料库的研究方法变成了可能。本文中，作者选取了中国学习者语料库中题为“Getting to Know the World Outside the Campus”的261篇学生作文作为研究对象。通过研究可以发现由词形错误和词汇使用错误造成的词汇错误最为严重，占错误总量的55.43%；词汇错误中最为严重的是拼写错误；其次是替代错误。高分作文和低分作文中出现的主要错误形式所占的比例相似。作者发现词汇错误与中英文的差异和中文的负迁移有关。作者认为，要减少词汇错误，教师要改变传统的词汇教学观念，加强词汇形式与其发音的教学。同时，教师应该强调通过词汇的发音规则记忆和拼写单词，引导学生学习词汇的更深层知识，并创造更多的机会让学生使用英语。与此同时，学生应多接触真实英文语境，加强真实语句的输入，并经常进行英语写作练习。

关键词：语料库；CLEC；词汇错误；大学生写作