Language Transfer In Noun Collocations: A Study On Chinese College Students' English Writing

Language transfer is a hot and controversial issue in the study of second language acquisition (SLA), which has undergone a long and uneven history of processing. This thesis is attempting to investigate whether language transfer plays a role in Chinese EFL learners'acquisition of noun collocations and how L1 influences learner's L2 acquisition.20 non-English majors in a Shanghai university were taken as the participants of experimental tests. Language data of the present study was collected from their compositions. The object of the research is noun collocations, mainly light verb+noun collocation, main verb+noun collocation, and adjective+ noun collocation, in these compositions. It is found that accuracy of light verb+noun structure ranked the first, followed by adjective+noun, and main verb+noun collocation. Errors of light verb construction were mainly caused by the difficulties in differentiation of light verbs. Word-to-word translation from Chinese to English caused the vast majority of main verb collocation misuses. Self-assigned "synonymy" was the major trigger of adjective+noun collocation errors. The present study shows that Chinese EFL learners'L1 (Chinese) has great influence on their acquisition of English noun collocations. Thus, L1 should be attached importance to in the process of English education so as to avoid as much negative transfer as possible.