A Corpus-based Study On Verb-noun Collocation Errors By Senior High School Students

Vocabulary is the basic unit of a language.One of the essential properties of language is the combination of language units and these recurring combinations are often called collocation.Vocabulary collocation learning is an indispensable part of vocabulary learning.Therefore,the study of collocation of lexicon is a subject that language researchers and educators must pay attention to.Many studies have shown that verb-noun collocation error is the most significant error among Chinese EFL learners.In recent years,many scholars have made use of corpus to do related researches on verb-noun collocation errors of Chinese EFL learners.Most domestic studies are based on the study of all English learners or college English learners in China,while the studies on high school students are very few.Moreover,as for the researches on the collocation of high school students' errors,the researchers do not know enough about the learning situation of high school students.Therefore,this paper takes the high school students as the research subject,applying the approach of corpus research mainly and the empirical research to further explore this topic.Based on the theory of error analysis,this paper first conducts corpus research.Taking the St2 of CLEC(Chinese Learner English Corpus)as the research subject,211 verb-noun collocation errors were retrieved by using the corpus retrieval tool Antconc3.43.According to Nesselhaulf's misclassification method and the actual errors of Chinese EFL learners,they are divided into six categories: incorrect choice of verbs,incorrect choice of nouns,usage error,misuse of prepositions,misuse of qualifiers and structural error.This paper uses Collins Dictionary and the English native language corpus "American Contemporary English Corpus(COCA)" as a supporting tool for quantitative analysis.The possible causes of these errors are analyzed both from interlingual and intralinguaal perspective.On this basis,this paper conducts a survey for senior high school students to learn their learning situation of verb-noun collocation.And a blank-filling test is designed for them to measure their verb-noun collocation ability.The corpus studies show that the main errors in high school students' verb-noun collocation errors are incorrect choice of verb and usage errors,followed by incorrect choice of nouns.Besides,misuse of qualifiers,misuse of prepositions and structuralerrors are relatively few.These errors are caused by the interference of not only mother tongue,but also the target language.The disturbance of mother tongue is mainly manifested in literal translation,lack of prepositions of intransitive verbs and absence of qualifiers.Interlingual interference is mainly manifested as over-generalization,contrary to collocation and ignoring the semantic rhyme.In addition,according to the data analysis of the filling-blank test,the levels of high school students' verb-noun collocation ability are positively correlated with their English proficiency.The results of the questionnaire survey show that most high school students have realized the importance of collocation but they lack effective learning strategies and guidance from teachers.Finally,based on the above research results,this study put forward some suggestions and measures for English vocabulary teaching in middle school.