Optimizing The Treatment Of Lexical Collocations In EFL Dictionaries For Chinese Learners

Briefly speaking, a collocation is just a group of words with a certain meaning which tend to occur together. There are three types of collocations: grammatical collocations, lexical collocations and collocations in corpus linguistics. This study mainly focuses on lexical collocations because they are problematic and difficult for EFL students to master. As an indispensable aid in English learning and teaching, the EFL dictionary should provide lexical collocational information sufficiently and efficiently. So, the aim of the present study is to optimize the treatment of lexical collocations in EFL dictionaries for Chinese learners.The study will be conducted from three aspects: 1) theoretical study of collocations in ELT, L2 vocabulary acquisition and lexicography; 2) study of the needs of Chinese learners through error analysis; 3) study of the presentation of lexical collocations in EFL dictionaries.The research shows that Chinese students have a lot of problems in learning English collocations, e.g. negative transfer from mother tongue, confusion between synonymous collocates etc. On the other hand, the treatment of lexical collocations in current EFL dictionaries is far from satisfactory, e.g. neglect of the learning difficulties of Chinese learners, inaccessibility to desired collocational information during an encoding process etc.Finally, the author puts forward some general principles and suggestions for the improvement of the treatment of lexical collocations in general-purpose EFL dictionaries for Chinese learners. The treatment should focus on the learning difficulties of Chinese learners.