L1's Negative Influence On Lexical Collocational Errors In L2 Writing

Vocabulary is central to language and of critical importance to the typical language learners, so it is the most difficult part to acquire. Teaching experience has proved that vocabulary competence has a close relationship with language levels and could not depart with a country's cultural background. This feature of words results in big differences between Chinese and English in both meaning and usage. Although there are some similarities in the building of collocations in different languages, much dissimilarity exist in language forms, thus collocational errors are always found in learners' interlanguage in second language acquisition (SLA), the source of many of which can, according to applied linguists studying language transfer, be traced to the negative influence of the first language (usually the mother tongue) of the learners.In fact, the discussion of L1's (Chinese) influence on L2 (English) learning has about half century during the course of second language acquisition research. Behaviorists' view considers that L1 is the main block in L2 learning, while mentalists demonstrate that the native language is an insignificant factor in SLA. A revived recognition of the importance of L1 in L2 learning is seen under the cognitivist position, so native language influence should not be ignored.English is one of the most widely learned languages in China. However, only a very small number of empirical studies on collocation have been done between Chinese and English and these studies are small in scale and not very systematic. So the author follows Corder's error analysis steps, used Condordancer and SPSS statistical device and adopts both qualitative and quantitative analysis in examining the sample and data of CET4 and CET6 students from the Chinese Learner English Corpus (CLEC). The present study focuses on the interference type which accounts for 36% of the total errors. L1's negative influence is mainly from learners' L1 syntactic, morphological and lexical knowledge.The findings of the present research show that:1. L1 has a strong negative influence on EFL students' L2 lexical collocation.2. The high-score achievers are different from the low-score achievers in terms of L1's influence on L2 lexical collocation. With the increase of English proficiency, less interference errors will be made by EFL learners.3. Learners' L1 syntactic, morphological and lexical knowledge is likely to be transferred into the learning of L2 lexical collocations, particularly the unmarked structures.This study has much pedagogical significance in that it helps to understand Chinese learners' process of the acquisition of English lexical collocations. It implies that Contrastive analysis of both Chinese and English would be conducive to the teaching and learning of vocabulary. It also points out that vocabulary should be taught and learnt in context.