A Corpus-based Study Of Collocation In Chinese EFL Learners' Oral Production

This present research is designed to provide a systematic account of Chinese EFL learners' collocational behavior in oral English and explore some of the issues involved,by adopting the main methods of CIA and CEA.Based on data from Spoken and Written English Corpus of Chinese Learners,it examines the overall distribution of collocations and collocational errors,identifies the features and underlying sources of the errors,reveals the resemblance and disparity in the learners' use of collocations across the spoken and writer registers,and explores the semantic features exhibited in their collocational behavior.In brief,Chinese EFL learners' collocational behavior differs in each of the six collocational patterns and verb-noun and noun-noun not only are the most frequent error types of collocations but also are most problematic for the learners.Each type of collocational errors has incorporated diversified features and is attributed to a variety of interlingual and intralingual causes,among which L1 transfer and assumed synonyms are the most frequent sources of errors.A contrastive study of the semantic prosodies of near synonyms in learner English with that in native speakers' English further finds that deviant collocations not only result from the violation of the collocational conventions of words but also from prosodic clash.Moreover,the learners' knowledge of collocation has not developed at the same rate as their knowledge of vocabulary in general.And differences of collocational use also exist across spoken and written registers,as a significantly smaller number of errors are committed in the learners' spoken production.Whereas the overall distribution,descriptive features and underlying causes of the errors present a similar picture.Based on the findings above,it is suggested that language teachers' and learners'awareness of the significance and difficulties of collocation be raised and explicit collocation teaching be conducted.A five-step procedure is developed and pedagogical strategies,such as contrasting L1 and L2 collocations,presenting near synonyms in collocational grids,and teaching collocations in context,are proposed to improve the effectiveness of explicit collocation teaching and learning.