A Corpus-based Study Of The Verb/noun Collocation Errors Made By Chinese EFL Learners

Error analysis is crucial for foreign language research and teaching. The present research adopts a corpus-based approach and aims to investigate the verb/noun collocation patterns of the Chinese EFL learners. Unlike the previous researches which are primarily conducted by experimental method, the present study is a corpus-based study of the errors committed by Chinese EFL learners on English verb/noun patterns. Based on data obtained from Chinese Learners English Corpus (CLEC) by computer and on the manual data-analysis, the present study puts forward the following research questions:What are the characteristic patterns of the Chinese college students' uses of verb/noun collocation?What are the major similarities and differences between the native speakers and the Chinese learners as far as the collocation patterns of high-frequency verbs are concerned?What has caused the significant differences between the native speakers' and the Chinese learners' uses of high-frequency 1 verbs in terms of collocations?What possible implications can the present study offer to English learning and teaching in China?This thesis consists of six chapters: Chapter One gives a brief introduction of the significance of thecurrent study, and the research orientation and the research questions of it. Chapter Two gives a general literature review related to this study, including interlanguage (IL), Contrastive Analysis (CA), Error Analysis (EA), Corpus Linguistics and Previous Corpus-based Study in collocation and verb/noun collocations in China. Chapter Three demonstrates the theoretical framework for the study in terms of error analysis, Contrastive Interlanguage Analysis (CIA) and lexical-grammar. In addition, specific research questions of the present study are also presented. Chapter Four is devoted to the introduction to the research methods for the present study, which includes subject selection, corpus data collection and the procedures of choosing the verbs for investigation. Explanations are given as to why these verbs are chosen but not other. Chapter Five will focus on the discussion of the findings from the results in the present study, aiming to explore possible causes for the occurrence of the verb/noun collocation errors committed by Chinese EFL learners. Finally, in Chapter Six, we present a conclusion of the present study. A brief summary, pedagogical implications and limitations of the present study are proposed.The major findings on the results are: 1) Chinese learners' uses of verb/noun collocation differ significantly from those of the native speakers. Noun collocates chosen by Chinese learners tend to be restricted to a few words, while noun collocates chosen by the native speakers tend to be much more diversified. Yet the verb collocates of the chosen nouns tend to be more diversified in the Chinese learners corpus. 2) Typical collocation patterns of a certain verb or noun in Chinese learners' writings may not be the typical collocation patterns in the native speakers' writings, or sometimes never occur in the native speakers' writings. 3) The major cause why the collocates chosen by the learners and the native speakers are often characteristically different is that the transfer (both positive and negative) of learners' mother tongue, Chinese has played an important role in learners' verb/noun collocational behaviour.The present study is significant in a number of ways. First, the learners' verb/noun collocational patterns shown in this study are reliable because they are generalizations based on the data obtained from a large-scale learner corpus. Second, pedagogical remedies proposed in light of the patterns shown in corpus analysis are more effective because they present a realistic picture of how an English expression develops in the Chinese-speaking learners. It is believed that the findings in this study are helpful for our understanding of the verb/noun collocational behaviour of Chinese EFL learners.