A Corpus-based Empirical Study Of Chinese EFL Students' Qualitative Knowledge Of High-frequency Verb Make

In the past twenty years or so,more and more researchers became to be aware of the importance of vocabulary acquisition in the field of Second Language Acquisition(SLA).However,the majority of studies in vocabulary knowledge have mainly concentrated on investigating how many words learners know by measuring vocabulary size in comprehension and production.Given the fact that a word has many properties in terms of meaning and syntactic behavior,there is the question of how well the learners know them.By a contrastive corpus analysis,the present study aims to observe the use of the high frequency verb MAKE in learner and native corpus.Specifically,the study aims to address:(1)Do Chinese English as Foreign Language(EFL)learners tend to overuse or underuse the high-frequency verb MAKE?(2)To what extent does the learner corpus deviate from the native corpus in terms of the qualitative knowledge of high-frequency verb MAKE?(3)What causes the deviant uses of MAKE in the learner corpus?By comparing the uses of MAKE in St5 and St6,two sub-corpora in Chinese Learner English Corpus (CLEC)with their American counterparts in the native corpus,Louvain Corpus of Native Essays(LOCNESS), we investigated the characteristics of Chinese students' use of the high frequency verb MAKE in their English interlanguage.The study shows that:First,the Chinese English Major TEM 4 students in St5 showed no difference,while the TEM 8 students in St6 displayed a strong under-use of the verb MAKE,compared with American university students.Second,a significant difference lied between Chinese learner corpora and native corpora in the distribution of colligation of MAKE.Although learners used only slightly more causative MAKE than native speakers,there is a striking proportional difference between the causative structures V+O+C and V+O+Bare inf.The learners tend to use more frequently the V+O+Bare inf.structure.In the V+O+Bare inf.structure,the non-native uses of link verb become,feel,seem and look with MAKE is more frequent than the native speakers'.In the V+O+C structure,the research found that learners are not familiar with using noun phrases as complements of the objects of MAKE.Third,the frequencies of the top 10 and 20 noun collocates of MAKE in St6 were much higher than those in native corpora,and the majority of noun collocate tokens in ST6 were also used in the NSE corpus;while the majority of noun collocate tokens in the NSE corpus were exclusive.Furthermore,there was significant difference in the top 20 noun collocates of MAKE,either by MI values or by T-scores,and the noun collocates commonly used by both the native speakers in LOCNESS and Chinese learners in ST5 and St6 have also been found to be significantly different in both MI values and T-scores.Forth,from the semantic distribution perspective,the rank order of the main uses of MAKE is nearly similar in the learner and native corpora,with the causative category topping the list,followed by category 2—the delexical use(do something).Furthermore,though there is no obvious difference in the use of delexical MAKE in three corpora,the frequency of 'speech' or 'verbal communication' collocates in learner and native corpora are different.Finally,the results of error analysis indicated that for the high-frequency verb MAKE,many of the deviant uses can be accounted for by the L1 interference.Chinese learners also tend to adopt the strategies of overgeneralization and ignorance of the rules restriction in their writing.It is suggested that concordancing software be used to help learners master the collocation and colligation of common verbs,and the instruction of grammatical forms is indispensable,and should not be neglected.The study also calls for the construction of lexical syllabus in the English teaching.