A Corpus-Based Study Of Chinese EFL Learners' Noun-Verb/Verb-Noun Collocational Errors

In the past decades, researchers and teachers have realized the importance of collocation in English teaching and learning, and lots of research studies on the learners' capabilities of forming collocations have been carried out However, at present, in the field of second language acquisition, the studies are still not thorough on the difficulties facing learners. The author gives a detailed analysis and discussion of two classes of collocational errors: one between nouns as subjects and verbs as predicates; the other between verbs as predicates and nouns as objects.This paper will address the following three questions: (1) What are the features of the errors made by Chinese EFL learners in forming each class of collocations? (2) What are the sources of the collocational errors? (3) Can we judge the proficiency of Chinese EFL learners by the quantity of collocational errors? The present study is based on two sub-corpora of the Chinese Learner English Corpus that have been compiled mainly by Professor Gui Shichun and Professor Yang Huizhong.The findings are briefly summarized as follows: (1) Lexical transfer is the most common sub-class of collocational errors in the class of collocation between nouns as subjects and verbs as predicates. In the class of collocation between verbs as predicates and nouns as objects, semantic choice is the most common sub-class of collocational errors. (2) There are three major possible causes of erroneous collocations: Chinese interference, overgeneralization and communication strategy. (3) We can judge language proficiency of Chinese EFL learners by the quantity of collocational errors they have committed.Therefore, we put forward the following proposals: (1) teachers should help learners to raise their awareness of collocation; (2) teachers and the editors of textbooks should better offer a large quantity of authentic input; (3) lexicographers are advised to compile English-Chinese collocation dictionaries; (4) teachers should improve their ways to correct learners' collocational errors.