Characteristics Of 'prep+noun' Collocations By Chinese University English Learners

The present study devotes to the characteristics of the preposition + noun collocations of the three prepositions, i.e. from, with, for, produced by the Chinese university English learners. A corpus-based Contrastive Interlanguage Analysis approach is employed in the study.By comparing the preposition + noun collocations of the three prepositions in St3, a sub-corpus of the Chinese Learner English Corpus (CLEC) with those in a sample of the British National Corpus (BNC), the characteristics of the collocations of the three prepositions produced by the Chinese university English learners in the St3 group are disclosed, in terms of quantity, the degree of appropriateness and the degree of accuracy. The study reveals that there are no significant differences in the overall frequency of the preposition collocations between the St3 group and the BNC sample, but at the same time, the Chinese university English learners produce fewer collocation types of the three prepositions than the native speakers. A careful examination shows that though some of the collocations of the three prepositions by the Chinese learners in the St3 group are also shared by the native speakers in the BNC sample, they are different in both Mi-score and Z-score, which shows that the Chinese learners have different sense of significance of the collocations from that of the native speakers. The investigation into the deviant collocations of the three prepositions in St3 indicates that language transfer is a vital factor for the misuses of the preposition collocations; besides, overgeneralization and ignorance of collocational restrictions also lead to the deviant production of the preposition collocations.Based on the above conclusions, some pedagogical implications are offered. The Chinese learners' awareness of collocations should get enhanced. Collocations can be better learned with reference to the Chinese language. More attention should be paid to the mastery of the collocations of common words, and in order to expand the Chinese learners' collocational knowledge, they should be encouraged to make as many collocations of a word as possible.