| As we all know, vocabulary is one of the most important parts in language learning. To master the vocabulary better, we must have a good knowledge of collocation. However, in English teaching, many teachers pay little attention to the vocabulary collocation, which restricts the development of students’learning ability. Collocation learning contributes a lot to learners’ language accuracy, fluency and appropriateness. Collocation is the key to the achievement of native-like competence. For English learners, using the appropriate collocation will make English learning much easier and more effective, but it is also difficult to learn.Based on the error analysis theory, this thesis aims to study the problems of the lexical and grammatical collocation errors of the junior high school students. In China, English learning starts at a very young age. In many parents’ points of view, it tends to be the earlier, the better. When students get into the junior high school, their levels of English vary from the beginners knowing little about English to the intermediate students with a large vocabulary. However, they have something in common, that is, their learning still stays at the lexical level. It means that they may know one of the meanings of some English words and can read them, but they can’t use each of them properly in sentences. Moreover, their learning habits are not formed as well. Therefore, it is the best learning period to raise their collocation awareness so as to lay a better foundation for the English learning.Thus, in the study the collocation errors are collected and analyzed in order to investigate the learning conditions of collocation in the junior high school period and give some teaching advice according to the causes.200 pieces of writing compositions have been carefully corrected. By quantitative and qualitative analysis, all together 212 collocation errors are tagged out and further analyzed. According to Benson’s classification of collocation, these collocations can be divided into lexical and grammatical collocations. The lexical collocation investigated in this study covers the whole six types "Verb+Noun; Noun+Verb; Adjective+Noun; Noun+of+ Noun; Adverb+Adjective; Verb+Adverb", among which verb+noun type has the most errors. Besides, the grammatical collocation has eight types "Noun+Preposition; Noun+to Infinitive; Noun+that Clause; Preposition+Noun; Adjective+ Preposition; Adjective+to Infinitive; Adjective+that Clause; Verb patterns", among which preposition+noun type and verb patterns type are the two major error types in students’ writings.In addition, through the interview of 15 students and the second language acquisition theory study, some major causes have been found, including the negative transfer, overgeneralization, language borrowing and so on. Sometimes there is not only one cause for a certain collocation, but more causes. The pedagogical implications are also put forward in this thesis, including raising the learners’ awareness of learning collocations, stressing the positive and negative influence of language transfer, using the collocation dictionary, and etc. All these implications will help students to learn the collocations effectively and improve their writing ability.Nowadays, most researches have been done mainly on theoretical study and the research subjects of empirical study are intermediate-advanced learners while few researches are on elementary-intermediate learners - junior high school students’ collocation errors. Though some achievements have been made, limitations still need to be mentioned. For example, the limited size of the subjects, chosen from one junior high school, which can not represent the different levels of students fully. Besides, some causes of the collocation errors may get missed due to the developmental nature of the subjects. These limitations require more efforts to further the study in the future. |
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