| Collocation competence is an important part in an English learner's overall language competence. This paper conducts an empirical study of Chinese college students' verb collocation competence and their writing proficiency. It attempts to explore the causes for college English learners' poor writing proficiency from the perspective of their verb collocation competence.The author implements a verb collocation competence test with relatively high reliability and validity on the basis of the tagged collocation errors and verb errors in the Chinese Learner English Corpus. The author also implements an English writing test to measure the subjects' writing proficiency. The subjects consist of 30 freshmen majoring in Economics and 18 sophomores majoring in English from Dalian University of Technology. It is found by using SPSS that Chinese college English learners' verb collocation competence is rather limited and varies greatly; their verb collocation competence significantly correlates with their writing proficiency; their productive collocation competence lags behind and significantly correlates with their receptive competence.Besides, the author analyzes the verb collocation errors in the subjects' compositions and interviews some of the subjects, whereby the possible causes for learners' verb collocation errors are found out and analyzed into categories. The errors fall into two categories: grammatically wrong use of verbs and the wrong choice of verbs. The causes concern learners' learning strategies, their output strategies, teachers' incompetence in collocations, and their teaching methods.Based on the above analysis, the author provides some suggestions for college English teaching: teachers should improve their own collocation knowledge and skills, increase students' collocation input, encourage students to use collocations, introduce new teaching methods and guide their students in the use of proper learning and writing strategies.
|
PDF Full Text Request