A Comparative Study Of Verb-noun Collocation Errors Committed By Chinese English Learners At Different Stages

Among the various errors committed by Chinese English learners, collocation errors play an important part. Although some analyses have been conducted on collocation errors, there are few researches on comparative analyses of collocation errors committed by Chinese English learners at different stages of English learning. This thesis chooses verb-noun collocation errors (VNCEs) committed by English learners as its main focus. Questions this thesis aims to answer are: 1) what are the similarities and differences between VNCEs committed by learners of different stages? 2) How can the answer to the first question help English learners or teachers to reduce the number of VNCEs in their or their students'writings?The present research is based on Chinese Learner English Corpus (CLEC). In this thesis, verb-noun collocation errors are classified into four types: grammatical, lexical, poverty of vocabulary and idiomatic VNCEs. Since mother tongue plays an important part in many VNCEs, this paper will also discuss mother tongue's role in VNCEs.A total of 1566 VNCEs are found in CLEC. Generally speaking, VNCEs occur more frequently in articles written by learners of lower stages. There are 213, 598, 505, 90 and 160 VNCEs in ST2, ST3, ST4, ST5 and ST6 respectively. 50 VNCEs are selected at random from each of the five sub-corpora and a comparative analysis is conducted on them. It is found that: 1) generally speaking, with the growing of learning time and the improvement of general English competence, English learners in China tend to commit fewer and fewer VNCEs; 2) most VNCEs are due to failure to understand word meaning precisely and command usages of idioms and restricted collocations; 3) to beginners and intermediate learners, lack of grammatical knowledge accounts for a certain proportion of VNCEs (about 10%); 4) more than half of the VNCEs are related to learners'mother tongue.Based on the above analysis, we may draw the conclusion that the number of VNCEs can be reduced through effort in the following aspects: 1) a practical way to reduce VNCE amounts is to spend more time learning English and try to move on to a higher stage of learning; 2) English learners need to pay more attention to different senses of English words and memorize more idioms and restricted collocations; 3) beginners and intermediate learners should pay more...