An Error Analysis Of Verb-noun Collocations By Chinese EFL Learners

Collocation has always been a topic of interest in linguistic research. It 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. Collocations, especially verb-noun collocations, are difficult to learn for Chinese EFL learners, as verbs are an indispensable part of grammar. According to statistic, verb-noun collocation errors take 55% among all the lexical collocation errors. In the past 20 years, corpus-based researches on verb-noun collocation have achieved a lot abroad. In China, researches and literatures on this subject are rather limited. 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-collocation in their production of the language. Therefore, based on the theory of Contrastive Analysis (CA), Error Analysis (EA) and Interlanguage (IL), with the assistance of Microsoft Visual FoxPro program and the statistic software SPSS, the author conducts a corpus-based qualitative and quantitative study of Chinese EFL learners' interlanguage verb-noun collocation errors (tagged as CC3) in Chinese Learner English Corpus (CLEC), with the purpose of finding out the typical collocation patterns of verb-noun collocation errors, the relationship between verb-noun collocation errors and learners' proficiency levels, the correlation between verb-noun collocation errors and other kinds of lexical collocation errors, and the similarities and differences between Chinese EFL learners and native speakers as far as the verb-noun collocational behavior of the individual noun and the individual verb is concerned, and thereby seeking the underlying sources of the verb-noun collocation errors. It is hoped that the results and suggestions of this study will shed some light on EFL teaching and learning.