The present study investigates lexical errors in Korean university students’ English writings. The main focus of the study is to examine if there are any differences in lexical errors between a junior college student group and a four-year university student group and if there are any differences between English major students and non-English major students.
A total of 145 students participated in the study: 65 junior college students and 80 four-year university students. The four-year university students were divided into two groups: (a)50 English majors; (b)30 non-English majors. A total of 145 writing samples were analyzed. The students’ data were evaluated and categorized by two native speakers of English and the researcher following Hemchua and Schmitt’s(2006) taxonomy of lexical errors.
Hemchua and Schmitt’s(2006) taxonomy included 7 overall categories: formal misselection, misformation, distortion, confusion of sense relations, collocation errors, connotation errors, stylistic errors. This study conducted both quantitative and qualitative approaches.
Findings of the study are summarized below.
First, many errors made by the students were caused by L1 influence and language transfer. The error types made by language transfer were borrowings and calques. And near synonym error types were very common in English writings, which indicates that the students had difficulty distinguishing similar words. This is due to a lack of exercise using proper words in a given context.
Second, students had difficulty using proper collocations. This means that the students pay too much attention to memorizing isolated words without considering which word can collocate with another.
Third, the students made more semantic errors than formal errors. Both learner groups, made semantic errors three times more often than formal errors in their writings. The most frequent type of lexical errors among the students’ writings was collocation, followed by stylistic and distortion types.
Fourth, statistically significant differences were found between the two learner groups in the category of stylistic errors, showing that the former group made more stylistic errors than the latter.
Fifth, there were statistically significant differences between the English major group and the non-English group in the category of distortion. Specifically, the latter group made more distortion errors than the former.
The findings of the study will help English educators figure out which type of lexical errors is the most troublesome case for Korean university students. They will also provide insights into which type of lexical errors should be emphasized in Korean tertiary classes. Such efforts will help students promote linguistic accuracy, which will eventually contribute to students’ development of lexical competence and their overall English proficiency.