A Study Of English Verb-noun Collocation Errors By Senior High School Students

Based on CLEC (Chinese Learner English Corpus), this paper makes a study onthe verb-noun collocation errors in the compositions of Chinese senior high schoolstudents. In CLEC, eleven major categories of errors are tagged. Collocation errorsrank the sixth among these eleven major categories of errors. There are six types ofcollocation errors, and verb-noun collocation errors rank the first (Gui Shichun&Yang Huizhong,2003). This paper tends to answer the following questions:(1) What are the major types of the verb-noun collocation errors committed byChinese senior high school students in their compositions?(2) What are the reasons for committing these verb-noun collocation errors in thewritings of Chinese senior high school students?The research subject is ST2, the sub-corpus of CLEC, which is composed of thecompositions of Chinese senior high school students. In this study,316verb-nouncollocation errors are retrieved by the software AntConc3.1.302. Through theanalysis of these errors, the major findings are:(1) There are six main types ofverb-noun collocation errors in Chinese senior high school students’ compositions,namely errors of noun/noun phrase，errors of verb/verb phrase， usage error,determiner error，preposition (noun) error， structure error.(2) The verb-nouncollocation errors committed by Chinese senior high school students are mainlycaused by inter-language transfer, intra-language transfer and teacher induced error.According to the characteristic of the distribution of the verb-noun collocationerrors and the main findings, some pedagogical implications are put forward to helpChinese senior high students reduce the verb-noun collocation errors in theircompositions.