A Corpus-based Study On The Verb-Noun Collocation Errors Of Chinese Advanced Learners Of English

This corpus-based study investigated the verb-noun collocation errors of Chinese advanced learners of English by adopting Chinese Learner English Corpus (CLEC). Two sub-corpora of CLEC are employed. One is St6 which is composed of free writing of third-year and fourth-year of English majors, with a total token of 226,106. The other reference corpus is St5 which consists of free writing of English majors in their first and second year, with a total token of 214,510. In this thesis, the corpora tool Antconc (3.2.1) and Chi-square of EXCEL are employed. In addition, to distinguish restricted collocations from free combinations and idioms, English dictionaries are adopted. The thesis tries to answer the following three questions:1. Compared with intermediate learners of English (St5), do advanced learners of English (St6) have any significant decrease or increase in verb-noun collocation error number? What is the underlying implication?2. What are the typical difficulties of advanced learners of English in the production of collocation?3. What factors are the verb-noun collocation errors mainly attributed to? And what are the implications for English collocation teaching?The major findings are: 1) English language learners, even advanced learners have considerable difficulties in the production of verb-noun collocations. The verb-noun collocation error numbers made by advanced learners of English (St6) have significant increase in compare with that of intermediate learners of English (St5) (p<0.05). This finding justifies Bahns's (1993) study. That is, one's collocational competence does not parallel to one's vocabulary knowledge in second language acquisition, especially at an advanced level. 2) Students'collocation errors show that their intuitive preference the open choice principle to the idiom principle. Of the three collocation categories, restricted collocations are the greatest problem for learners. Most of the collocations that are found to pose problems are frequent, every-day expressions. Do appears to be the most problematic high-frequency verb for the learners. Verbs appear to be the most difficult element in collocations. Deviation was found to occur not only in the verb but also in other elements of the collocation (nouns, determiners, numbers etc.) and in the use of collocations as wholes. 3) Both interlingual and intralingual transfers are mainly responsible for the verb-noun collocation errors. Based on the findings and conclusions, we have the following implications for the language pedagogy: 1) learners'awareness of collocations should be raised. Unnoticed language items are unlikely to become intake. Therefore, teachers should try to help the learners to recognize the collocations in the contexts, especially the category of restricted collocations and collocations should be acquired as a whole. 2) Learners are encouraged to have access to more authentic language materials and strive for overcoming the interference of first language. 3) Learners at advanced level should not only try to broaden their vocabulary size, but also try to explore the depth of vocabulary, especially the collocational patterns of the common words. 4) More authentic language input should be provided to learners, and teachers should try to improve the learners'collocational competence.