| The importance of collocation is widely recognized in the language learning, teaching, and research. In recent years, with the rising and development of corpus linguistics, corpus-based collocation studies are too numerous to be counted. Master theses and doctoral dissertations based on CLEC are quite fruitful. Corpus for English Major (CEM) is the first learner corpus to reflect the target language use of English majors in China more comprehensively and systematically. Based on CEM, with LOCNESS and COCA as reference corpus, WordSmith as tool, this study is trying to explore the adjective-noun collocations used by Chinese English majors, and find the major types of adjective-noun collocation errors; and make comparison with the native speaker corpus. Ten node words with comparatively high frequency in CEM will be explored, and more importantly, this thesis will detect the underlying causes and put forward certain effective practical suggestions.The retrieving outputs from corpus indicate that the literal translation is the most prominent reason in the Chinese English majors' misuse of adjective-noun collocations in written productions. Since they attempt to find the equal adjective-noun collocations in Chinese, they will translate or create the collocation based on the collocational principles in their native language. The major findings on Chinese English majors' collocational behaviors are summarized as follows:(1) The Chinese learners are inclined to translate the collocation literally and produce semantically similar English collocations based on the collocational principles in their native language, e.g. behavior principle and necessary ability; (2) Learners often misuse the English synonyms with similar Chinese equivalents, e.g. ability and capability; big and great, etc. so result in the adjective-noun collocation errors; (3) Compared with the native speakers, Chinese learners tend to over-modify some nouns, e.g. ability, with much more diverse adjective collocates. (4) Even a word has the high frequency in corpus like risk, it is not necessarily deductive that it can form many adjective-noun collocations, and have diverse collocates. (5) Like native speakers, Chinese learners tend to use a word in its set phrase, e.g. time in set phrase like at that time, at any time and at the same time, especially when collocations are in line with Chinese collocational patterns because of safety and laziness. For the same reasons, some adjectives which have relatively general meaning with limited restriction are very commonly used by learners to collocate with almost all nouns for they are regarded as omnipotent adjectives like good, great, and many.Based on the findings, three practical suggestions are put forward in this thesis to improve Chinese English majors'collocational knowledge in the future language learning and teaching, that is (1) Adopting the integrated teaching approach to collocation. Lexical, semantic and grammatical factors should be taken into consideration in the teaching of collocations. (2) Applying corpus and its tool (like WordSmith) in language teaching and learning, since it is helpful to develop learners' abilities of self-learning and collocation (3) Adopting strategies to minimize the negative transfer of mother tongue, such as more exposure to the authentic target language materials, and paying special attention to the differences of cultural and social factors in the use of collocation. Besides, learners can do more reading concerning rich topics after class, to foster linguistic sensitivity and intuition of collocation, which can also reduce negative interference.
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