Collocation Errors: An Insight Into ESL Teaching And Learning At Intermediate Level

This thesis provides exciting ideas on English Collocation and takes a close look at the various causes of collocation errors made by English Learners of Chinese at the intermediate level. The thesis begins with the features of English collocations such as their prefabrication and conventionalization. As the types of collocations has indicated that they are between the idioms and creative word combinations. For close observation of the collocational competence of ESL learners, collocation errors are collected from over 150 pieces of essays written by second year students of Dalian Maritime University, which are described and classified in terms of their stylistic and semantic features as well as the part-of-speech rules they have violated. In diagnosing these errors, four causes are inferred: the influence of Chinese, misselection of the target language, and the inducement of teachers, dictionaries and teaching materials. The thesis also provides some possible solutions to enhance the intermediate learners' collocational competence, but they are so empirical and experimental that further research has to be added. It is suggested that teachers of the intermediate learners will point out collocates while introducing new words, and they should not do blind reading or clear language up by word lists. The learners, on the other hand, should be motivated to notice and collect collocations by themselves to raise their awareness of how English words are chunked, for which a collocation notebook is strongly recommended. Although there is no total agreement in the collocation research fields, the thesis can inspire that more teachers, linguists and even learners themselves can develop their own teaching or learning methods in this field, thus a native-like production of learners can be finally realized.