The Effect Of Psychotypology On The Acquisition Of English V+N Colligation By Tertiary Chinese EFL Learners

The present study sets out to investigate the acquisition of English colligation by Chinese EFL learners, more specifically, the effect of psychotypology on the acquisition of English V+N colligation by Chinese EFL learners. Colligation is the unity of grammatical rules, semantic meanings and pragmatic contexts. It has the effect of enabling L2 learners to achieve accuracy, idiomaticity and fluency. The researches of SLA found that the colligation can help the learners to promoting native-like fluency and native-like selection. In the present study, a colligation is a syntactic structure within which a collocation occurs and is generally specified in terms of grammatical categories, here V+N is a colligation.It has long been recognized that the already learned native language has effect on the target language. Language transfer appeared because of the perception of the native language and the perceived distance between L1 and L2. In a series of studies of Kellerman, the perception of the coreness of semantic of the NL learners can predict the transferability. The key factor of the transfer is the perceived distance between the L1 and L2, i.e., psychotypology.An empirical study was carried out to investigate the effect of psychotypology on the acquisition of English V+N colligation, with the help of 35 postgraduates of English major, 36 freshmen of English major and 36 juniors of English major. 35 postgraduates made judgments of 17 collocations within the V+N colligation of "build" and 17 collocations within the V+N colligation of "create" from the periphery to the coreness and from abstract to concrete according to their intuitions of their native language. 72 tertiary students of English major made the judgments of translatability of the same V+N colligation, and made judgments of the acceptability of 30 English sentences with the V+N colligation of "build" (including the 17 collocations of "build" ) and 30 English sentences with the V+N colligation of "create" (including the 17 collocations of "create" ).The findings of this study are: (1) the correlation between the translatability and the coreness of "build" and "create" is significant, so the Chinese EFL learners' intuitions of the coreness of "build" and "create" can predict the transferability of "build" and "create". This proves the existence of psychotypology. (2) The learners' perceptions of what is transferable, i.e., the intuitions of "build" within the V+N colligation is not influenced by their L2 proficiency; but for the case of "create", learners' intuition of what is transferable is influenced by their L2 proficiency. (3) The psychotypology has effect on the acquisition of English V+N colligation within some range.The results of the present study are significant for the acquisition and teaching colligation. The Chinese learners and teachers should pay more attention on psychotypology which has effect on the native-like selection of the target language.