A Corpus-Based Study Of Verb/Noun Collocation Errors By Chinese Non-English-Major College Students In English Writing

Collocation is a topic of great interest in contemporary linguistics, especially corpus linguistics. Collocation proficiency has been recognized as one of the ways that differentiate native speakers from foreign language learners. However, collocation is difficult for Chinese EFL learners to learn. According to Gui & Yang (2003), collocation errors rank the sixth among the eleven major types of errors and among the six types of collocation errors in CLEC, verb/noun collocation error ranks the highest. Moreover, in the past 20 years, researches on collocation have achieved a lot abroad. In China, researches and literatures on this subject are rather limited.Therefore, based on the theories of Interlanguage, Contrastive Analysis and Error Analysis, with the help of concordance software, the author conducts a corpus-based quantitative and qualitative study of Chinese non-English-major college students'verb/noun collocation errors with the attempt to find out the distribution and characteristics of these errors, and thereby seeking the possible causes of these errors and providing the pedagogical implications.This paper mainly addresses the following four questions: 1) Is the number of verb/noun collocation errors correlated with the learners'L2 proficiency levels in most cases? 2) What are the types and characteristics of Chinese non-English-major college students'verb/noun collocation errors? 3)What are the possible causes of these verb/noun collocation errors? 4)How the learners'use of verb/noun collocations differs from that of the native speakers'?The major findings are as follows: The number of Chinese non-English-major college students'verb/noun collocation errors is negatively correlated with the learners'L2 proficiency levels in most cases. These verb/noun collocation errors can be classified into four major categories in relation to causes. They are: interlingual errors, intralingual errors, communicative strategy-based errors and induced errors. The major cause of these verb/noun collocation errors could be attributed to the negative transfer of the mother tongue. There exists little overlap between the verb/noun collocations chosen by the learners and the native speakers.Based on the analysis of the findings and conclusions, some pedagogical implications are offered: 1) Teaching English collocations in comparison with Chinese; 2) Teaching English collocations with the help of dictionary; 3) Teaching English collocations with the help of corpora and concordancers. However, this research is only a tentative study on verb/noun collocation errors. There are inevitably some limitations in the analysis, so more efforts are needed to further the study in the future.