A Corpus-Driven Study On Verb-Noun Collocational Behavior Of Chinese EFL Learners At Different Developmental Stages

The present study is intended to investigate the verb-noun collocational behavior of Chinese EFL learners at three different developmental stages—senior high school (HS), college English of non-English majors (NM), and college English of English majors (EM). By examining learners at different stages, the study aims to uncover the features of Chinese EFL learners' use of verb-noun collocations,Corresponding to the three developmental stages, the learner corpora employed in the study are HS, NM and EM corpora, which are reconstructed from the parent corpora of the Chinese Learner English Corpus (CLEC), the Written English Corpus of Chinese Learners (WECCL) and a self-built Dalian Maritime University corpus. On the basis of a corpus-driven approach, the study focuses on the collocation patterns of five most frequent verbs used by learners of all three stages. They are have, do, make, get and learn, which are chosen based on word frequency lists of the three learner corpora By comparing the collocations of the five verbs in the three different corpora, HS, NM and EM, with those in the reference corpora, the BROWN corpus and the LOB corpus, the features of the collocations produced by the Chinese learners of English at different stages are revealed, from the perspectives of variety, the degree of typicality and the degree of accuracy.The study shows that, compared to the native speakers, the Chinese EFL learners at all three stages display a strong tendency to overuse the five verbs. In terms of the overall quantity and collocation type, i.e. the variety of the collocations of the five verbs, learners at NM produced the largest number of collocation tokens in the three learner corpora, with significant differences against HS and EM. Yet NM learners did not use significantly more collocation types than HS and EM. In regard to typicality, learners across the stages show a general weakness in the use of the typical collocations with reference to the native speakers, as measured by the T-score and Mi-score. Concerning the degree of accuracy, it is further studied from two aspects: the token accuracy and the type accuracy of the collocations of the five verbs. The results indicate that learners at NM stage committed more collocation errors than HS, EM learners, demonstrating a U-shaped pattern of development. As to the type accuracy of the collocations, it is found that Chinese EFL learners' collocational knowledge improves in an upward direction from HS to NM, and from NM to EM, though the degree of the development is not significant.Based on the research findings, the discussions come up with some practical implications for EFL vocabulary teaching and learning in China.