Collocation Patterns Of Delexical Verbs In Chinese EFL Learners' Writing

The present study focuses on the collocation patterns of six delexical verbs, i.e. do, get, give, have, make, take, used by the Chinese EFL learners at two different proficiency levels. A corpus-based Contrastive Interlanguage Analysis (CIA) approach was adopted in the study.By comparing the collocations of the six delexical verbs in St4 and St6, two sub-corpora of the Chinese Learner English Corpus (CLEC) with those in the Corpus of Canadian Native University Student English Essays (COCNUS), the striking patterns of the collocations of the six delexical verbs produced by the Chinese learners in the St4 and the St6 groups are revealed, in terms of quantity, the degree of appropriateness and the degree of accuracy. The study shows that, compared to the Canadian native university students, the Chinese learners in the St4 and the St6 groups showed a strong tendency to overuse the collocations of the six delexical verbs, but at the same time, they produced fewer collocation types of the six delexical verbs than their Canadian counterparts. The further investigation indicates that though some of the collocations of the six delexical verbs produced by the Chinese learners in the St4 and the St6 groups were also shared by the Canadian native university students, however, they are different in the T-score and the Mi-score, which show the typicality of the collocations. Furthermore, a large proportion of the collocations of the six delexical verbs used by the Chinese learners in the St4 and the St6 groups, especially those unshared by the Canadian native university students, are often of a kind typically found in speech rather than in writing. Although the signs of progression in terms of the competence in the collocations of the six delexical verbs are found between the Chinese learners at the two different proficiency levels, however, the degree of the development is not significant.The examination of the deviant collocations of the six delexical verbs in St4 and St6 shows that general verb effect is a vital factor for the misuses of the collocations of this kind. The strategies of language transfer, repetition and avoidance were preferred by the Chinese learners in the St4 and the St6 groups in the production of the delexical verb collocations.