Features Of English Adjective-Noun Collocation In Chinese EFL Learners' Writing-A Corpus-based Study

As a ubiquitous phenomenon in language use, collocation is of vital significance to language acquisition and is the key to idiomatic expression. The development of corpora provides an opportunity to describe and study language in ways that are quantitatively and qualitatively different from the models and descriptions that have previously been available. With the development of learner corpora, the learner performance is expected to be better investigated.Based on the authentic corpus data from the Chinese Learner English Corpus (CLEC), the present study attempts to explore the features of the Chinese EFL learners' use of adjective-noun collocations. With the method of Contrastive Interlanguage Analysis, a cross-sectional study is conducted to investigate Chinese learners' behavior of adjective-noun collocations across three proficiency levels. Research data are retrieved from three sub-corpora of CLEC: (1) ST2 (writings of senior high school learners), (2) ST3 (writings of college non-English majors (year1-2)), (3) ST6 (writings of English majors (year3-4)). The reference corpus LOCNESS is employed as a baseline to evaluate Chinese learners' performance. The software Antconc is utilized to retrieve the information needed. Z-score and Mi-score are adopted to determine the significance of the co-occurrence between collocates. This study is intended to be an integration of both qualitative and quantitative analyses. Two adjectives and two nouns are selected as the nodes, all of which have relatively high frequency in English. By analyzing the noun collocates of two adjectives and the adjective collocates of two nouns, some major findings are yielded from the study: there is a clear progress of collocational knowledge among Chinese EFL learners across three proficiency levels in terms of adjective-noun collocation. The degree of semantic accuracy and variety increases with their improved language proficiency. However, compared with the native speakers, Chinese learners display the feature of non-nativeness and the tendency to employ the early acquired high frequency adjectives as collocates. Despite the developmental tendency, fossilization tends to occur in the area of adjective-noun collocation. The most proficient Chinese learners at EM level still make some collocational errors.