Study On Collocational Errors In EFL Learners' Writing

Collocation is important for the achievement of native-like competence. It has been recognized as one of the ways that differentiate native speakers from foreign language learners. In the past 20 years, corpus-based researches on collocation have achieved a lot abroad. In China, researches and literatures on this subject are rather limited. Collocation is difficult for Chinese EFL learners to learn. Collocational errors have been one major type of lexical errors. Farghl and Obiedat (1995) point out that one efficient way to raise the awareness of collocation is to focus on a selection of the target EFL learners'mis-collocations in their production of the language. Therefore, the author conducts an empirical study on collocational errors in Chinese college non-English majors'writing, with the purpose of finding out the distribution of these errors and thereby seeking the underlying sources and ways of prevention. The subjects of this empirical study are 120 non-English majors from different departments and different grades of a university in Changchun. The samples are 117 valid compositions completed by these subjects. 288 collocational errors are found in these compositions. By quantitative and qualitative analysis, these collocational errors can be further divided into seven categories by the author. They are: collocational errors in verb, mixture of parts of speech, literal translation, collocational errors in preposition, collocational errors in adjective, collocational errors in noun and collocational errors in adverb. These collocational errors are not distributed evenly in writing. Collocational errors in verb take the largest percentage. This is either because verbs are the most frequently used in...