Focusing On Typicality And Divergences

Vocabulary teaching to non-English majors is one of the most difficult and ineffective areas in China. Both teachers and students are in urgent need of more effective and practical ways of dealing with vocabulary. Among various theories and approaches to which they can turn for help, corpus linguistics is one of the latest and most enlightening. Contributions from corpus linguistics to vocabulary are twofold: one is concerned with methodology and the other, with theory development. Its methodological advantages are embodied in the research method of Contrastive Interlanguage Analysis (CIA). By comparing native speaker language and learner interlanguage, CIA can show not only learners' misuse/errors, but also overuse and underuse/avoidance of particular features of a given word/phrase, thus shedding light on vocabulary teaching and learning. As for theory development, one major contribution concerning vocabulary is the notion of 'patterning', which took up and developed Firth's two concepts - 'collocation' and 'colligation' and added to them another concept - 'semantic prosody', which is a phenomenon only discovered through corpus analysis. The three function together to form a network of meaning.As verbs are regarded as the most important part of vocabulary and present much difficulty to learners, this thesis attempts to investigate Chinese EFL learners' use of verbs by reference to corpus linguistics, In doing so, we adopt corpus linguistics' view of verb 'patterning' and make a CIA of native speaker language and Chinese learner language to explore possible factors affecting learners' use and to suggest some ways to improve it.The main body of the thesis began with the notion of 'patterning' followed by a detailed explanation of the three concepts - collocation, colligation and semantic prosody. After that a research was conductedin which we chose three verbs - 'adapt', 'survive' and 'caused' to make a CIA between native use and learner use. All the data came from representative corpora with native use from LOB and learner use from Chinese Learner English Corpora (CLEC). The results showed that learners do not capture the typical use of the verbs as evidenced by their misuse, overuse and underuse/avoidance of particular features. Next, two factors affecting learners' use were sketched: one is lack of typicality in teaching, which was further studied in two aspects -inadequacies in textbooks and major reference books and teachers' inadequate knowledge of the verbs; the other factor is native language influence, which is examined in the wider context of the relationship among native language, target language and inter language. Based on the study, a focus of verb teaching was suggested, that is, a focus on target language typicality and learner divergences as embodied in CIA. Finally, pedagogical implications concerning textbooks and reference books as well as practical classroom teaching and learning methodology of such a focus were discussed in the hope that they would contribute to the teaching of verbs and the teaching of vocabulary as a whole.