An Analysis of lexical errors in the English compositions of Thai learners

The importance of vocabulary in second language (L2) writing is widely accepted, but there has been relatively little research into the lexical errors learners produce when writing in their second language. Moreover, the error categorisation frameworks used in some previous studies have addressed only a relatively limited number of lexical error categories. In this paper the authors used a more comprehensive error taxonomy based on James (1998), with some additions from Leech's semantics (1981), to analyse Thai third-year university students' English compositions for lexical errors. The analysis revealed that (a) 'near synonyms' were the most numerous errors, followed by 'preposition partners' and 'suffixes', (b) the students had more difficulty with semantics than the forms of words, and (c) the identified sources of errors were mainly from L2 intrinsic difficulty rather than the first language (L1) transfer. The findings from the Thai students' written lexical errors have implications for L2 vocabulary teaching and learning, which should be of interest to wider English as a Second Language (ESL)/English as a Foreign Language (EFL) contexts.23 page(s