A Corpus-based Study On Chinese EFL Learners' Verb Collocation

Collocation is one of the most difficult parts for Chinese EFL learners and it plays a significant role in the evaluation of learners'language proficiency. Study on the collocation errors in learners'production of the language is an effective way to raise learners'awareness of collocation, thus improve their proficiency of the target language as a whole. As verbs are grammatically indispensable in the English language and verb-noun collocation errors form the largest component of verb collocation errors, verb-noun collocation becomes the focus of this research.Learners'corpus adopted in this study is CLEC (Chinese Learner English Corpus), the corpus used for comparison is BROWN (Brown University Standard Corpus of Present-day American English). The writer analyzes learners'collocation errors with respect to colligation and collocation, therefore the focuses are on the error types of vp1 and cc3. AntConc is used to retrieve the words that co-occur with these two error tags, thus two wordlists are generated respectively. Then the two wordlists are inspected manually to exclude those which are not possibly used as verbs. Five verbs are chosen from those two wordlists as the object of study—make, say, want, cause and increase. By analyzing those five verbs, the writer intends to summarize the typical features of Chinese EFL learners'use of verbs and probe into the causes behind that. Its final purpose is towards constructive proposals for English language learning and teaching in China.It is found that the learners tend to overuse, underuse or misuse some colligations for most chosen verbs. The use of collocations proves to be a major problem for the learners. The collocates for the same verb in a certain colligation chosen by the learners are often in significant disagreement with that of the native speakers. The ultimate cause of the learners'somewhat deviant uses of the verbs is their insufficient mastery of the native speakers'typical collocations concerning the uses of the chosen verbs.Based on these findings, proposals for language learning and teaching is put forward: the key point is to increase language input by using authentic materials of the target language; the second point is to intensify the learning of individual words—knowing the meanings and figures of speech of a word is far from enough, learners should be exposed to more information of the collocation, colligation aspects of the word concerned; introducing concordance into language learning is regarded as a rather effective way of raising learners'sense of collocation and getting to know more idiomatic collocations in the target language.