A Study Of Verb-noun Collocation Errors In English Writings Made By Senior One Students

Collocation refers to the co-occurrence of two or more words that frequently appear together and are restricted grammatically.Collocation competence is treated as an important factor to evaluate the learner’s language proficiency,in that collocation can raise learners’ fluency both in spoken and written language.Also,learners’ language production could be easily understood and more native-like if they use collocations.However,many English teachers pay little attention to collocation teaching in class,assuming that students’ collocational knowledge will increase automatically as their vocabulary levels improve,but this is not often the case.Thus,collocation,especially verb-noun collocation,poses a difficulty for Chinese students in learning English.Luckily,the importance of collocation has been gradually recognized and many empirical researches have been carried out at home and abroad.Nevertheless,most of the studies have investigated learners’ verb-noun collocation knowledge at their different language proficiency,and there are a few studies of collocation on students of their diverse lexical levels.Furthermore,the subjects of these researches are mainly advanced English learners,while the English learners of senior high school students are neglected.Therefore,this thesis,based on the framework of Nesselhauf’s(2003)classification of verb-noun collocation errors as well as the theory of Error Analysis,attempts to investigate the verb-noun collocation competence of senior one students of different lexical levels in a senior high school of Nanchang.In the present study,100 compositions written by 100 senior one students within 30 minutes are collected and 457 verb-noun collocations are extracted,and among these collocations,173verb-noun collocation errors are found.This paper tries to answer the following research questions:1)What is the general picture of verb-noun collocation errors in senior one students’ English writings?2)What are the characteristics of verb-noun collocation errors in senior one students’ English writings across different lexical levels?Through the interpretation of quantitative and qualitative analysis,the following conclusions could be generated.Firstly,there are 457 verb-noun collocations extracted from 100 senior onestudents’ English compositions,among which 173 verb-noun collocation errors are found and there are 284 correct collocations.In other words,the accuracy rate of verb-noun collocation in students’ writings is 62.14%,which is slightly more than60%,and it means that senior one students’ verb-noun collocation competence is far from satisfactory.Moreover,among all the six-subtype verb-noun collocation errors found in students’ compositions,the verb selection error ranks the first,and the second most frequently misused error is determiner error.In addition,the verb-related preposition error ranks the third in all the six types.Coincidently,the number of the errors caused by wrong selection of noun and adjective is the same,which is comparatively less than that of preposition errors.Compared with the above five sub-types error,the structure error has the least number.Secondly,on the one hand,the number of students’ collocation error is linked with students’ vocabulary levels to some extent.That is to say,the number of students’ collocation error decreases with the increase of students’ lexical level.But only students of low and high lexical level have a significant difference in the number of collocation errors,while students at low and medium vocabulary level have no great discrepancy in that.On the other hand,there exists no significant difference in each type of verb-noun collocation errors committed by students of three lexical levels.On the basis of the findings above,some pedagogical implications for verb-noun collocation teaching and learning are offered.For instance,it is crucial to raise students’ awareness of collocations.Also,it is suggested that teachers had better teach collocation in comparison with Chinese as well as enlarge collocation input and output in and after class.What is more,learning collocations with the help of dictionaries will contribute a lot to students’ acquisition of collocation knowledge.