A Study Of Chinese EFL Learners' Collocational Competence In Writing

Current college English teaching for non-English majors is challenged by the urgent demand to improve their communicative abilities.However,most of the non-English majors' ability to write and speak is still far from enough,especially when compared with their competence in reading.On the other hand,the studies of collocation in English language are increasingly coming into people's attention. Linguists and researchers both at home and abroad are gradually realizing that learners' collocational competence confines the development of the fluency and accuracy of their interlanguage.It is easy to find that many students tend to use unacceptable collocations in their writings.The present study is undertaken to explore the frequency of different collocations used in Chinese EFL learners' writing,including the mistakes that learners tend to make on collocations.The research questions are:1.Do students make more mistakes on grammatical collocations or lexical collocations?2.Do students make more mistakes on fixed collocations or creative collocations?3.Do students use more unacceptable collocations than acceptable collocations?The subjects involved in this study are 50 second-year non-English majors from different departments of Suzhou Art and Design Technology Institute.They are required to write an essay of at least 120 words on a given topic and outline within 30 minutes.All the writings are fed into computer and then graded by three experienced English teachers strictly following the criteria for grading CET 4 compositions.The final result of a subject's English writing proficiency comes from the average grade by three graders.The average scores are calculated and divided into four levels---level A,B,C,and D.Two pieces of writing with extremely low scores(less than 5 points) are picked out and excluded from the study.Therefore,the data are collected from the remaining 48 pieces of writing that are found to be valid.Then,the data are collected according to four aspects:1) Frequency of Grammatical Collocations and Lexical Collocations;2) Frequency of Fixed Collocations and Creative Collocations;3) Frequency of Errors on Grammatical Collocations and Lexical Collocations;4) Frequency of Errors on Fixed Collocations and Creative Collocations.The major findings of the study are as follows:1.Students make more mistakes on lexical collocations than grammatical ones. Lexical collocations seem to be more difficult for EFL learners than grammatical ones.They usually do not know how to choose the proper words to express their creative ideas.Conversely,grammatical collocations have attracted much more attention of both teachers and students than lexical ones.2.Students make more mistakes on creative collocations than fixed collocations.Most errors on creative collocations concern with unexpected and creative lexical items.When learners do not know how to choose the proper words to express themselves,they either misuse assumed synonyms or just make literal translation from Chinese into English.3.The total number of acceptable collocations is bigger than unacceptable collocations.However,with grammatical collocations excluded,students use more unacceptable ones than acceptable ones.Therefore,we can draw the conclusion that students use more acceptable grammatical collocations than unacceptable grammatical ones,but use more unacceptable lexical,fixed, and creative collocations than acceptable ones.That is to say,compared with grammatical collocations,students make more mistakes on lexical,fixed and creative collocations.Possible causes for the learners' creative collocation errors in particular,and unacceptable collocations in general are discussed.In a narrow sense,literal translation and overgeneralization are two main factors that cause creative collocation errors in the learners' writing.But in a larger sense,we find that unacceptable collocations are caused by the interaction of many different factors,including the poor English learning environment,the interference of mother tongue,the negative influence of English tests like PRETCO-A & CET-4,learners' improper learning strategies,and errors induced by teachers.The above mentioned findings and analyses are illuminating for language teaching and learning in Chinese EFL learners' context.First,collocation should be used as input and output unit in language teaching and learning.Second,vocabulary should be taught on the basis of context.Third,college English teachers should try their best to improve their collocation proficiency.