A Survey Study Of Chinese Learners' Behavior Of Verb-Noun Collocation

Collocational competence is an important aspect in the evaluation of learners'English proficiency. However, for Chinese learners, collocation has always been an area of difficulty. Verb-noun collocation especially becomes a tricky issue. Therefore, the author conducts a survey study on the Chinese learners'behavior of verb-noun collocation with the purpose of finding out the characteristics of their collocation behavior and exploring the factors affecting the learnability of verb-noun collocation and thereby making suggestions in English language teaching.The subjects of this survey study are 67 freshmen from Jilin University majoring in Finance & Trade. The author analyzes and studies the 61 valid test papers. The paper includes 20 verb-noun collocations. 579 collocation errors are found in the valid papers. By analysis in detail, the author concludes two distinctive characteristics of their collocational behavior. First, the subjects tend to use more general words rather than concrete words. Second, the subjects are more likely to show confusion of synonymous verbs. Factors affecting the learnability of verb-noun collocation include complexity of collocation, complexity of synonyms, psychological consideration of collocation, similarity and difference between mother tongue and target language, learning strategies and classroom instruction and materials.Based on the analysis, the author proposes some suggestions for EFL/ESL teaching. First, teachers and learners should raise the awareness of collocation. Second, teachers are supposed to modify the teaching materials to enforce the study of collocation. Lastly, teachers should guide students to make full use of...