Negative Transfer Of Chinese On English Verb-Noun Collocations And Its Implications For Sla In Senior High School

The concept of negative transfer has historical roots. Language transfer has been a central issue in second language acquisition and language teaching for nearly a century. In the last few decades, its status in second language learning has been reassessed several times. Though its importance in second language learning has once been severely played down especially in the 1970s, language transfer has in recent years aroused people's interest again and received wide acceptance as a complex mental process. It is considered to function in second language learning together with a number of other factors. With the development of computer industry nowadays, corpus linguistics has also attracted many linguists'attention. They have studied language transfer from different perspectives and at different levels using corpora and computer software tools and search engines.In recent years, more studies have been concentrated on corpus-based investigations into Chinese negative transfer on the acquisition of English verb-noun collocations. The data of previous studies have revealed that the verb-noun collocation pattern occupies the largest portion in the learners'collocation production. As shown by the statistics based on the Chinese learner English corpus, among the categories of collocation (cc) errors, cc3 (verb-noun collocation) becomes most prominent. Researchers already know that some errors of this kind are caused by the negative transfer of Chinese. Researchers have already done some empirical studies on how Chinese influences the acquisition of English verb-noun collocations.In this thesis, the author chooses the sub-corpus of CLEC and makes a general survey of the mis-collocations in the verb-noun pattern made by senior high school students due to Chinese negative transfer. Because of the limited data in ST2, the author also carries out a self-designed research (questionnaire, Chinese-English translations and writing) to collect more data to supplement ST2. The author chooses 106 subjects who are in their second year of senior high school. 56 of them are from Zhicheng Private School located in Shenyang, while the rest of them come from the Senior High School Affiliated to Liaoning Normal University located in Dalian. Obviously, they have different English proficiency levels. Comparing the data from different sub-corpora of CLEC and also data from the self-designed research, the author gets to know whether EFL of different English proficiency levels show differences in the influence on the acquisition of English verb-noun collocations. Moreover, using the native corpora BNC and COCA which are free on line, a comparison of some verb-noun collocations between Chinese EFL in senior high school and native speakers could be made. The factors which cause Chinese negative transfer are also studied: unfamiliarity with semantic prosody of some English verbs, ignorance of the different use range of Chinese and English verbs, difference in the transitivity of English and Chinese verbs and word-for-word translation from Chinese into English. At last, the pedagogical implications of this thesis are pointed out to help teachers improve their verb-noun collocation teaching strategies in senior high school.