A Study Of Collocation Errors Made By English Majors

Over the past 50 years or so, studies of foreign language learning have occupied a central place in the area of applied linguistics. Applied linguists have made much research on the state and process of learner language through analyzing the written or spoken production of language learners which is called interlanguage (IL) in the field of second language acquisition. Error analysis as a chief means of diagnosing learner problems has been adopted since the early days of foreign language teaching. Collocation is a universal linguistic phenomenon and it is very important for the achievement of native-like competence. This study attempts to investigate collocation errors made by English majors in China in their compositions with the method of error analysis.According to Benson, Benson and Ilson's classification of collocation, the study first identified and analyzed the collocation errors made in the students' compositions and then explored possible causes of collocation errors and some difficulties students meet in using English collocation. Based on the major findings, some suggestions are offered to students, teachers and researchers respectively.Due to the nature of the study, both quantitative and qualitative research approaches were used. In this study, quantitative approach was utilized in investigating grammatical collocation error, lexical collocation error and other errors in 117 compositions. SPSS computer software was used to explore the relationship between collocation error and other errors. Qualitative approach was employed taken in describing thedifferences of collocation errors made by the top students and the lower students and in analyzing the causes of collocation errors.Some major findings of the study are presented in this thesis. They show that indeed some collocation errors were made by the students in their compositions. And the students made more errors in lexical collocations than in grammatical collocations. Among grammatical collocation errors, the collocation errors between preposition and noun and adjective occupy 60.4%. This shows preposition is one of difficulties in collocation learning. The most problematic aspect of lexical collocation lies in the construction of VPs, which mainly caused by the interference of Chinese. By using the SPSS software, the study obtains that the Pearson correlation coefficient between collocation errors and other errors is 0.649. It shows collocation errors and other errors made in the students' compositions are positively correlated. That is, a student makes few other errors, such as spelling, tense and agreement, etc. if he/she makes few collocation errors. Through contrasting and analyzing the collocation errors made by the top students and the lower students, some differences between collocation errors made by these two kinds of students are found. The differences -include the top students make fewer grammatical collocation errors than the lower students do and it is more difficult for the researcher to locate the collocation errors made by the top students. Furthermore, this study explores the causes of collocation errors through analyzing the collocation errors made in the students' compositions. The possible reasons are: negative transfer from Chinese, negative transfer from the target language whichincludes students' overgeneralization of the target language and ignorance of rule restrictions, transfer of training and students' using some inappropriate communication strategies. Also the study points out that synonyms and prepositions in English are two main difficulties the students meet in their collocation learning.The study attempts to make a scientific research on English collocation errors made by Chinese college students in English Major, but there are some limitations in this study. The size of compositions used in data analysis may be relatively small in regard to drawing a comprehensive conclusion on the study of collocation. Also, there may be miscounted errors because of the researcher's limited ability. However...