A Study On Non-English Majors’ Collocational Competence In Writing

Collocation is very important in the second language learning, but inthe history of vocabulary acquisition and vocabulary test, it has ever beenneglected. Here collocation refers to lexical combination frequentlyoccurring in the natural language, and it is an important part of lexicalapproach. The stability and predictability make learning a foreignlanguage much easier from memory to retrieval, and it has closelyrelationship with the output including accuracy and fluency. The centralof language teaching should increase the collocation awareness andimprove collocational competence. According to the relevant theories ofcollocation, the degree of students‘and teachers‘attention and thestudents‘collocational competence are set as the emphasis of the surveyin the present paper.The research questions to be addressed in the study are as follows:1. What is students‘perception of collocation and collocationlearning?2. Does the non-English majors‘collocational competence correlate with their writing proficiency?3. Do students make more mistakes on grammatical collocations orlexical collocations in their writing?The subjects involved in this study are150non-English majors fromCollege of Arts and Science, Bohai University. All the writings are gradedby three experienced English teachers strictly following the criteria forgrading CET4compositions. Data is analyzed through SPSS.The following shows the results of the study:1. The analysis implies that students‘collocational competence isrelatively low, and the lack of test is an important factor in their lowcollocational competence.2. It is positively correlated between non-English majors‘collocational competence and their writing proficiency.3. Students make more mistakes on lexical collocations thangrammatical ones. Lexical collocations seem to be more difficult for EFLlearners than grammatical ones.The above mentioned findings and analyses are illuminating for university English teaching. First, vocabulary should be taught on thebasis of context. Second, ratio of collocational competence test should beincreased in students‘English examinations.